The bats have left the bell tower

Hugely recommended, this interview with Martin Mills, owner of the most important independent record label in the world (and the bloke who released some of my favourite records ever and still does):

The internet has revived interest in music, thinks Mills, by encouraging people to experiment.

"It's made so much more possible - a greater and deeper love of music. It's re-stimulated my own involvement in music generally, rather than just my business. The links people send you allow you to go off down a path and discover something great.

"People who in their 30s a few years ago who may have stopped listening to new music, or were listening to iterations of music they heard in their late teens or early twenties, are now able to discover entirely new things. You've got new artists being discovered by 30, 40, 50 and 60 year olds. You'll now have a group of friends talking about music and sending links. I think that comes from the integration of the laptop into both our working and our personal lives, the internet is so great at spreading the word."

[From Indie music mogul: The net's great for us • The Register]

Two minutes fifty / it’s a 45 single / oh yeah

This post, originally from August, 2006, in reply to a question from Robbie Siataga on an earlier post, linked, still seems to work for me. I thought I'd repost it for NZ Music Month, and because of the ongoing discussion on Public Address:

------------------------------------

This was a question I received from Dubmugga;

where do you see New Zealand music going and what measures would you implement to ensure it's continued relevance in the standardised global media market ???

This is not somewhere I really wanted, as I said, the previous two posts about this topic, to end up. I don’t want to dig myself a hole here I can’t easily get out of, but I suspect I’m about to.

So a qualifier again: this post is not trying to offer definitive answers, rather it’s a series of random thoughts, written as they occur. My opinion is just that and I don’t pretend to have any answers or pretend to be able to predict anything. I’m no seer, and I'm no self proclaimed expert.

DM…you expressed your fairly strongly held, feelings about NZ on Air and the way they administer the brief they have from the people of NZ, via the current government, to promote the nation’s music across the broadcasting spectrums. Your opinions are not uncommonly held and are regularly expressed on various forums and elsewhere.

Whilst I have my problems too with some of this they’re not nearly as pronounced as yours and others' are. It is a topic, however, that a lot of people, musicians especially, feel very strongly about.

Myself, I think NZ on Air is trapped a little between the need to promote something with a strong indigenous flavour (i.e. the cultural side of its brief) and the commercial radio stations who, despite lip service have no desire to play any real percentage of New Zealand music and would, if the political environment was right, drop most of it as fast as they possibly could. It’s a tough place for Brendan to be and for this reason, and a few others, I am of two minds about the concept of a quota. On a clear downside, and evidenced in NZ recently, the quota (and I’ve said this many times) strips the music of its identity, especially its cultural identity, in the mad drive to get songs on a radio system that is obliged to play a percentage but only wants to play songs that fit easily.

They don’t want songs that quirkily stand out, they want songs that blandly sell ads, songs from acts like Breaks Co-op, the new Stellar and Brooke Fraser which are facelessly unthreatening. I’m not saying they’re bad…Breaks Co-op are quite pleasant. But that, sadly, is not what the NZ music industry, if it is to thrive and survive, needs. It needs raw and rough originality, music that sounds different to that global mass released daily. I think Scribe had that, it was so wonderfully Newzild despite its pretensions to being otherwise.

However, I have to say, it’s an ominous sign that his new, massively overdue, album is being recorded (partially with DJ Premier, a bit of a hero of mine) in NYC. But that’s what the soulless bulldozer that is Australian A&R (which has had a shitty record in recent years) does I’m afraid, as I know from personal experience.

The US music industry is in massive trouble and yet these acts strive to sound like it, where the hell is the logic in that. The most influential NZ music in recent decades, the music which has had an international presence (with the exception of Haley, but that’s another whole thing) is music that sounded drastically different to everything else out there, and was, with the exception of How Bizarre, deemed to be decidedly radio unfriendly (and HB was deemed to be unsuitable for radio in NZ by every programmer but one originally). I’m talking about early Split Enz and the Flying Nun catalogue of the eighties. Nothing else out of NZ has had the musical influence of those three outside the country.

Up against that is the need for hits. Pop music is driven by hits which traditionally are driven by radio and video, hence the two main targeted focal points for NZOA. And I agree with that focus generally. Without hits, underground or overground, no sales. You can’t survive on credibility, as Flying Nun found, being forced to bring in Mushroom as a partner (which started the process where NZ’s most important catalogue disappeared into an American corporate which will inevitably eventually forget it exists).

But that formula…radio, video, hits…is changing and will change in future years (and not too future…very few predicted Youtube five years ago, although the pointers were there) in ways we can’t imagine yet. How the hits will come will change and that change has already begun. Digital access to everything, unbelievable interactivity in our entertainment and the sheer amount of material available to each and every one of us is inevitably going to force a sea-change in musical entertainment as radical as the one the planet endured when recorded music first became widely available about 90 years ago.

Already one thing is obvious. The album as such is more or less in its death throes. It’s going to take a while but it’s inevitable. The song, which is where this all started, is where it’s all going back to, and the delivery medium is a form of digital or the suchlike. It’s easy to forget that the album as a force is less than 40 years old. And there are very few successful albums that haven’t been driven by one or two key songs. Even the iPod and its equivalent is just an interim step…already music capable phones are dealing to standalone MP3 players in the more technologically advanced societies of Asia.

This inevitable step makes the major record companies largely redundant. All they really offer now is the means of distribution and the money to record and make videos. The last two requirements have more or less already slipped out of their hands as the means to do both are to a releasable level are within the means of virtually anyone.

The video delivery process too is in the process of being democratised. The means of distribution offered by the majors will still be a strength as long as people want to buy CDs from brick and mortar shops, but the end of that is in sight too, perhaps not in the next couple of years but sooner than most people realise. And any requirement for physical CDs will be fulfilled by central warehousing linked to shops that are little more than ordering and listening booths, mostly in Wal-mart / Warehouse type operations. Already the hardcore artist fanbases are almost exclusively catered for on-line.

The only other thing the big boys can offer traditionally is marketing muscle. Once again the digital revolution, right now the likes of MySpace and the p2p sites and MP3 blogs are removing that from the domain of the majors and placing it in the hands of the artists or their switched on management. Ever wondered why the big boys are so violently against the P2P sharers. They’ve been screwing people for decades without a conscious ethical murmur, so the righteousness of their position is questionable. No it’s because it removes another layer of control, of need for their services. The majors will soon be reduced to little more than catalogues to be licensed, and a few mega acts that can’t survive outside the machinery of those companies.

In 2006 over 20% of the music sold globally now comes from sources outside the majors. As that creeps more and more on-line it means that a larger percentage of the return from the sales of music will return to the makers. A record or CD will no longer need to have a massive comfort zone in the pricing (about $10 per CD on a full priced NZ disc) to cover the majors’ bloated costs, or the “warehousing”. The artist will, hopefully, no longer have to suffer punitive recording contracts. Even the role of the publisher is reduced to little more than a bank and a sync negotiator as the digital age and various performing rights organisations provide all the services a writer really needs. The balance shifts.

So what has this got to do with the future of NZ music. Everything, actually. It’s a reasonable assumption that in the medium term multinational labels will cease to invest in local music. Australia has already seen a huge drop in local signing in the past couple of years and the same is evident in NZ.

In my previous post I talked about the digital divide between New Zealand and the rest of the planet. On the NZ Radio list I was lambasted a while back by someone for saying that NZ has no hotspots. The argument was that NZ did not have the population of support such technology. That, of course is nonsense. Here in Bali, with a population of 3.5 million, they are everywhere, in the tourist areas, in the domestic areas, in the malls, the food halls; and it’s the same across much of the world. That’s a little thing but it’s important as it signifies the gulf that has developed between New Zealand and much of the world. I now reside in a third world country but I feel that, visiting New Zealand regularly, as I do, I’m going into a technology vacuum there. The technological gulf has tempered the music buying habit that we took so much for granted in previous years. And for kids to buy music, especially NZ music it has to be two things, exciting and accessible. The quota has largely removed the exciting bit, and the difficulty of getting local music beyond the traditional means (which means buying an album, not the songs you want) has dampened accessibility.

As the digital move is made away from majors and multinationals, so NZ on Air’s role will have to change. How exactly I’m not sure, but a return to their grassroots seems obvious, supporting the smaller, cutting edge, more innovative music being made at that level. I think the export drive, the funding of such and the relentless talking, committees, and reports are and were a waste of space and time. Unless of course you have something viable to sell. No one was doing Fat Freddies abroad but there are 200 Brooke Frasers. Which one makes more sense to push. And yet the whole NZOA system has been dedicated to the likes of that latter because it made our radio happy and worked for the quota. FFD on the other hand were made by the fans, both in NZ and abroad, and, like Split Enz, in 1979, driven to radio by the public.

So as I said earlier, the mad rush to radio removed the things that made so much music identifiably ours. The industry got caught up in the whole “kiwi music” thing and “kiwi music month” so much that it lost track of what was special in the first place. I think we do our best musicians a disservice too by putting all “kiwi music” on such a pedestal, forever saying that we have so much talent in NZ, implying that it is somewhat more advantaged than the rest of the world.

Of course we have talent, but no more so than a city of four million people anywhere else in the world. There are some, no make that, many, truly awful musicians and bands in the country too. Being “kiwi” doesn’t make the 50% of stuff on most “Kiwi Hit Discs” that is un-listenable, any better than it is in the real world.

Our edge and the ability to sell New Zealand music elsewhere doesn’t rely on where we come from, to most of the world, it matters little. They don’t care and don’t want to care when they hear Six Months in A Leaky Boat or How Bizarre, on the radio, where it was recorded. Lets not be parochial and arrogant about this. Our edge comes from the fact that these songs sounded completely, radically, different to whatever else was on the dial. A difference that the quota has dulled, with tangible results now.

Ok, that’s enough from me…I’ve said my bit, probably a bit too much. Some of the opinions expressed are probably rather crudely put and need fleshing out somewhat but I think I need a Bintang……

It’s a long way from home / welcome to the Pleasuredome

There were two great scams in the 2000s (assuming the decade is over..it’s technically not of course).

One, it almost goes without saying, was the drive to war scam pulled fairly successfully by the Bush administration in concert with a few compliant governments (the UK and Australia come to mind) whereupon clear and known fraudulent data was placed in front of not only the public as a whole, but whole layers of elected officials and lawmakers across the US and the UK. It was the WMD scam and arguments continue as to whether it cost the lives of 100,000 or a up to million Iraqis (as if the lower figure is somehow better) and the wholesale dispossession for millions more. From a US perspective, I guess it was hugely successful.

The second, whilst it existed on another, less deadly, level altogether, was no less successful, and involved the large media companies, many smaller media companies and assorted copyright administration bodies. This we will call the Piracy Scam.

Why am I revisiting this now? Well the piece briefly excerpted below pissed me off:

How to help prop up the ailing music industry? Tax Google, suggests a new report commissioned by the French government.

I’m close to speechless at the stupidity of this.

It will make no difference. None at all. Nothing will boost the revenues of the wholesale industries beyond a complete 180 on the part of the customer back to the buying habits they, in increasing numbers, left behind during this last decade. One has to remember that the folks making these rules, and the ones crying foul over the alleged lost revenues are either people in their mid-40s onwards, who if they buy music, were educated to buy it in album format, in the decades since the recording industry invented the format in the late 1940s, or they simply don’t buy music.

And they’ve been told that revenues are down (true) because people are simply stealing the music online (extremely arguable).

Are people taking music in large quantities online…yes, of course they are, there is no doubt of it. Is this causing the crash in revenues? I’d argue yes, in small part, but that’s all.

And that’s aside from the glaring and oft stated fact that a downloaded tune does not equal a lost sale, despite the rampantly loony figures the IFPI happily touts (and are gobbled up by the media).

The primary reason revenues are down is because the primary target for recorded music are people under 25. And they no longer buy albums. Mostly they don’t even know what they are. They buy MP3s..the new singles. They don’t want albums. They want tracks. And the evidence to support this is voluminous. Last year in the United States there were 1.16 billion (yep, billion) digital tracks sold. That is the equivalent of 1.16 billion singles purchased, because that’s what the MP3 is..a single..a 45, in the old language. Add to that just under 400 million albums (of which some 3.2 million were actually 14 album box sets by The Beatles, so add another 40m or so to that figure!) and you have a very, very large number of units purchased by customers in 2009…far higher, in fact, than at any time since Soundscan began recording accurate figures in 1991.

Throw into that mix two other factors, firstly that the digital figure removes the cost of manufacturing, distribution and warehousing, and secondly the huge drop in recording costs over the past decade as digital became the norm, and a rather different picture emerges.

On, and one more figure to toss into the mix: the decade long rise in performance income received by performing rights organisations as many different income streams, driven by technology, plus the massive advances in collection techniques and the sad story that both the media and the lawmakers happily trumpet without question, looks increasingly shaky. The Times did an analysis using a few, but not all, of these factors a month or two back which was interesting.

The truth is that in 2009 there was a massive jump in income from music worldwide:

Thanks to new collecting bodies, more music users buying licences, and a big rise in US revenues, global performance rights payments increased by 16% to $1.5bn (£940,000) in 2008, according to industry newsletter Music & Copyright.

Performance rights revenues come from the public playing of music across various locations and platforms, from radio stations and nightclubs to supermarkets and hair salons.

Such income has become more important in recent years as music sales have fallen. The UK is the largest territory in terms of performance rights distributions and total payments rose 11.5% to $220m (£138m) in 2008, according to Music & Copyright. It compiled its global figures through data from collecting societies worldwide, including PPL in the UK. The most played song was Mercy by Duffy.

The largest increase was in the US, with payments surging by 176% to $100m (£62.7m) as digital and internet radio services were licensed.

Mix all that together and toss in the now accepted monstrous myth that musicians are now unable to survive off their royalties (performance is up, and less than 1% of all acts likely survived from master copyright royalties, due to the inequities in the way the recording industry handles recoupment, despite what Bono and Lily Allen would have you believe) and have to struggle. They’ve always struggled.

So, yes, as we roll into three strikes legislation the world over, and labels moan poverty because the playing field and the rules have changed, a little sanity would perhaps be appropriate as we reflect on how well the Piracy Scam, has been sold, as I repeatedly hear people that should know better commenting on the Facebook generation that won’t, so they say, pay for music. That steals and destroys the livelihoods of those that make the music.

It’s bullshit.

And it didn’t even take a speech from Colin Powell.

Here within my lonely frame / My eyes just hurt my brain

These things are sent to sent to test us….

· A couple of days back we tried to buy some Shakespeare (do I need to put a wiki link here? After this I ain’t sure). We, naturally, went to the only English language bookstore in Bali, Periplus. Periplus is a chain here in Indonesia, and has at least a dozen branches across the island. Its most generously described as a little sad, with lots of tourist aimed coffee table books, badly printed, and odd cut-out biographies and motivation tomes, but it’s all we have. We asked at the counter and the guy studied the computer for a few minutes.

Yes we have Shakespeare..its in the Fiction section.

Oh, ok…

I guess fiction works loosely although I’m thinking that Richard III and Henry V, amongst quite a few other names subject to the quill of whoever Shakespeare may or not have been, actually have existed at one time. The very helpful girl took us over and offered us this.

Uh, no, we want any of the works of William Shakespeare…our daughter is studying him at school...its part of the national curriculum, both English and Indonesian…oh, you’ve not heard of William Shakespeare? This is a bookshop?

Yes

An English language one?

Yes

You’ve not heard of Shakespeare? Oh, only that book….But not William?

No, Pak…..

· I’ve had a series of emails from a company in Jakarta recently. They’re one of the larger fabric retailers in the city, with a turnover, I’d guess, in millions. Their Sales Manager sends his emails to me as attachments. These attachments come as Microsoft Excel worksheets. Each word takes up a separate cell……

· Here’s a company who sent me an email in their massed mail-out…their website is fairly well written and contains lots of information…but after all the effort to do that…their website is a blogspot….odd. I also received the email address of every one of their potential customers in the address field, so I imagine I’m in for a raft of other offers for things I don’t need (like the Bandung grain storage company who mail me daily the same email offering me grain hoppers). I’m tempted….

· PLN is the local power company. One of the bizarre things about the electricity system in Bali (aside from its expense and absolute unreliability) is the fact that they don’t tell you how much you owe. Elsewhere on the planet, in my experience at least, the utilities companies send you a nice letter at the end of a billing cycle, sometimes even with a wee newsletter to read on the loo, and you pay it. In Indonesia, or at least in Bali, it’s up to the consumer to actively seek out the amount due out and pay it before they cut you off. Several years in, I’m still confused by this but I think one is obliged to either stand in a queue at some office, or ring a number, or…anyway it’s bizarre. So I was pleased when I found the PLN Bali website (this I won’t link to). You go into it, enter the number of the account (which brings up the name of a person no-one I know has ever heard of and an address a little different to ours...but that’s Bali...you simply never attempt to apply logic to any situation) and up comes an amount which you can pay (a friend takes it to the office with hers). But now, we have a bit of an issue with the process: both IE7 and Firefox have detected that the web designer, who I guess is a contracted-in young-scallywag, has implanted a virus in the page’s code. A couple of links on the page to get further information on a couple of things (like how to save money on your power bill) trigger a virus download. An email to the company and the webmaster has garnered no response.

· Our emailed invoices from our suppliers in Indonesia come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Some come as 6MB bitmaps ( per one page document), others are Excel spreadsheets with the print area set to 365 pages, and so on. This is extremely handy when one punches Ctl-P and wanders off to make coffee.

· We learned early on, but not early enough sadly that you don’t give your business card to Indonesian trade organisations. The end result of that folly is endless emails from companies all over the world who’ve been sold the list. The ones from Indonesia tend to be often incoherent and likely link to a website which doesn’t exist. It seems that registering and setting up a website are less important to Indo businesses than, to indicate importance, claiming to have one. Think of the money it saves….
If, on the off chance it does link to something there is a better than even chance that it will be either completely non-navigationable, with multiple dead links and / or crashing Flash 5; or has been authored with a huge variety of fonts over a wallpaper background of a similar colour to the type, with a variety of spinning and flashing applets and animated gifs. It will also say ©2003 Optimised for Netscape Navigator 2 And IE3. Email addresses on these sites are never live or clickable and exist inside a graphic to defeat any use of Ctl-c. They are often far too long to remember without writing down. You will never get a response from these emails, at least 50% of which bounce back as these companies like to change their email addresess every month or two to prove, once again, how modern they are. You are better to fax through a request as faxes are increasingly big news and look likely to supplant the typewriter and the dot-matrix printer in a few years.

· Last year we bought a printer..a mid priced Brother multi-function thingy. It came with spare ink and we topped up earlier this year in Malaysia where compatible ink sells for about $5 a cartridge. But the black ran out last week and I’ve spent half the last week trying to find it with no luck. The place we bought the printer from still sell the machines but ink is One month from Singapore! So we went to Carrefour, down there on JL. Sunset. They have the ink listed on their wall display but don’t actually stock it. Thus we decided a new printer may be the only way, as there was some urgency and they’re not overly expensive. So we saw a new Canon….do you sell the ink for this? No? Which of the dozen or so printers you have for sale here, do you have ink for? None…

· In Indonesia, banks’ websites generally look like they’ve been authored circa 1996, for Mosaic or the like. Parts of them may or may not load and they may have frames within frames. To get a simple balance on my bank, Permata’s, site, I need to go through five levels of clicking…any one of which may freeze the browser. Its interface was last updated in 2003 and does not work in Firefox. Emails to these people are never ever, ever responded to. The online transfer bit has a very, very small space for the payee’s name…too small for most names. If the full name is not given, or a comma or full stop is in the wrong place the receiving bank, depending on their mood, may reject it. Brigid can often hear me screaming at, and bashing the computer as I try to pay the phone bill online or note that the internet payment, with all details correct and mucho funds has been returned for the third time because it’s name is one letter too many for the Permata site’s space. This is their corporate profile page.

· But for all that, my biggest frustration right now has nothing to do with Indonesia. It’s, again, DHL in New Zealand, who, after three years of doing it, forgot to send the mail from our mailbox up to as on the first of the month. They claimed that they had no record of having done so in the past, and it wasn’t “something we do” said the helpful person, as she copied the email into the Global Mail Forwarding Manager. So all the things I mentioned above fade a little...they’re just a result of education and technology gaps. DHL’s error is just plain incompetence.

And you may ask yourself / Well...How did I get here?

A lifetime ago David Byrne and Brian Eno released My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. Not only was it an addictively entrancing record, it was also a musical milestone.

Its use of samples and loops was absolutely revolutionary. Sure samples had been used before but never in such a core way that it was the essence of the released recording. It quite literally opened the floodgates for a raft of innovations and pointed the way towards new roads up which thousands have trod and continue to do so almost thirty years after it was recorded.

It was one of those records...

In 2007 they reissued the album and, taking the concept one step further, encouraged others to use parts of a couple of tracks and remix them and no cost.

That concept was later picked up by the likes of Radiohead who encouraged, or allowed remixes of tracks from their last album. That album was the subject of a major flurry last year when it was, famously or notoriously, depending on where you came from, essentially offered for sale at the price you wanted to nominate, including free. Then it was later commercially released.

The, how shall we say, more traditional, arms of the recording industry took some pleasure in saying the experiment had flopped, pointing to the percentage who paid nothing, or, more recently to the numbers who, despite the offer at the band’s site, look it from P2p or Torrent sites.

All that of course rather missed the point, that being, that from Radiohead’s point of view, which really was the only one that mattered, it was a roaring, profile increasing, money making, chart topping and stadium filling success. It took them as a brand and a ban to a new level. And the recent round of publicity only added to the simple fact that they are more current now than they would ever have been if they’d resigned to EMI..a Google news search got almost 5000 hits…just on the current Radiohead news..

The analysis of the RH figures came from, predictably, the chief economist of the UK collection agency, PRS, who was unable to see the proverbial wood for the trees in his joy to release the download figures. Part, just a small part, mind you, of which was that overall numbers downloaded dwarf recent Radiohead sales, and thus the album is in that many more homes, which I’d imagine any band or manager would reasonably be happy about.

But Byrne and Eno have taken the concept one step further, as you only could in these broadband times. Their new album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, was released online yesterday, via a dedicated site which will allow you to listen to their album forever free, as long as you stream it or download a widget from either their site or via developer Topspin Media. That widget is below.

And then, having listened to the album all day (as I have), which, as an aside is quite spookily lovely..far more so than I expected, since I’ve not been a Byrne fan in recent years…I’m able to continue doing so day after day, or I can buy it in a variety of formats, hard and digital, or a mix, including lossless FLAC.

It’s hard to see how they could offer more to the consumer…how the consumer could be made to feel better about the artist and the record. And how the artist, who gets the bulk of whatever is paid for copies sold, not just a small royalty against recoupment (less packaging deductions, and a new technology deduction etc blah blah blah), could do better. It’s a mighty mighty win-win…even if 95% of folks never go beyond the stream

And the simple fact is that it’s getting harder and harder, for acts like this and many others, to see what a proper record company could add to the mix anymore, as they furry around trying to rewrite the traditional deals.

Is there anything less artist friendly than a 360 deal?

I said once before that we are at the beginning of the tip of the start of the germ of this digital delivery model, and that, as I believe, the iTunes road might eventually turn into a dead end as a wider network of search and delivery, perhaps out of the hands of huge corporations like Apple, takes hold. Especially as there is so much drive to innovate.

To quote TopSpin co-founder, Ian Rogers:

And I don’t think it’s controversial to say software will play a role in the future of music marketing. Artists, managers, and labels alike will use some sort of software to help them manage direct relationships with fans, find new listeners, measure the success of their business, pay licenses and royalties, etc.

Things like Everything That Happens Will Happen Today are a clear pointer that way.

Technorati Tags: David Byrne,Brian Eno

Some things you'll never get used to / some things you'd rather forget / let's say it again

Here's an anniversary some would rather forget:

........2008 marks the 10-year anniversary of two of the first MP3 players, the Eiger Labs MPMan F10, and the Rio PMP300, but chances are you didn't listen to a first-gen MP3 player in 1998. With the first iPod still three years off, most of us were in the heights of our compact disc addiction 10 years ago, content to hear our music on portable CD players. Hell, some of us still listened to cassettes....

In early 1999 I was at a Festival Mushroom conference in Coffs Harbour, Northern NSW, with the Festival NZ team and all the discussion, well in between the stuff about how shockingly bad all the ocker bands were, was about the first generation players just hitting the market.

And about Rupert Murdoch (he owned the company and his son James ran it)  and Roger Grierson's (he was MD) plan for an online database of music that one could download to these primitive machines.

Over a few beers, we laughed a little at the idea....

Technorati Tags: MP3

a thousand people walking / everybody talking

There's a set of data that shows that file sharing is actually good for artists

So says Douglas Merrill, Google's former Chief of Information, who is now running EMI’s digital division.

Ahhhh…wow…haven’t a bunch of folks been saying that for years. It’s hardly a ground breaking revelation to many of us. Common sense tells us this…we don’t need research to tell us this surely. Artists are all about currency. Sure it’s a fine balancing act but the reason Michael Jackson and The Beatles and Elvis were so huge is simply because they existed beyond the record store. Their currency as artists, and as figures in popular culture, and thus their revenue earning ability, came from the fact that they had a momentum that was not subject to whatever ads the record label put in the magazines or however many copies they’d sold. They sold because of that popular momentum not the other way around.

And in a similar way, mass pickup and exposure via P2p implies a validity and a momentum in itself and to attempt to translate those downloads to lost sales is simply to miss the point.

Artists and their managers should be over the moon that their tracks are being shared and encouraging that.

I suggested to a label a year back that a band should give away 10,000 copies of their hottest track….hand it out at schools on a CD. If one in ten of those makes it onto an iPod or a Zen, it worked. And then launch the single on Limewire...complete with ‘new single out now’ advertising. This was a year before Radiohead. It met with blank uncomprehending stares.

Maybe, just maybe, one of the labels is finally getting it.

Technorati Tags: EMI,P2P

We thought that we had the answers / It was the questions we had wrong

Am I the only person who can see the blatant hypocrisy in Paul McGuiness ‘ Cannes comments, as I look at the U2 flavoured iPod, and recall those omnipresent TVCs. I guess not…

What exactly did he think was going to go on to those, as he puts it “burglary kits”??

And to say, as he does…

Those were the days when iTunes was being talked about as penicillin for the recorded music industry.

In 2004? When talk of Mp3 piracy was as rampant as it is now…seriously Paul, are you that ignorant or simply willfully trying to cover your arse.

How are those $200 ticket sales for U2 going? Or that remastered CD set of a twenty year old album for US$30 list price…?

And a question Paul...if we say no to your ideas, will Bono go away.......

Technorati Tags: iPod,Paul McGuiness

Hold tight wait till the party's over / Hold tight We're in for nasty weather

Ultimately, all these scenarios have to satisfy the same human urges: What do we need music to do? How do we visit the land in our head and the place in our heart that music takes us to? Can I get a round-trip ticket?

Its getting lot of press pretty much everywhere at the moment, and there isn't much there that hasn't been said many times before but David Byrne's Wired musings on the state of the recording industry as it relates to artists and record companies ties it all together rather well and is well worth the time to read. And the conversation audio snips with Brian Eno are very much worth the extra few minutes if this topic is of interest. These are not minor players.

Technorati Tags: David Byrne,Brian Eno

hear that sound / the hammers pound and pound

And the world jumps ahead, just a little bit more, this morning…Radiohead of course dismissed the countdown site leading to their new album in the last day or so, but rather conveniently (and co-incidentally?) it have them a fairly large bump in publicity leading to today’s announcement of their new album.

Of course this news is gonna be everywhere later today, but the thing is, like the Amazon site, Radiohead have converged the digital and the tactile worlds together. Their new album is available on their site from the 10^th of the month...and you pay what you want. The stampede is predicable..Radiohead fans are obsessive. The thing is, that the terrestrial version is not out until December and then with fancy packaging and a bonus disc.  So everyone wins, the fans and the artist, and everyone thinks Radiohead are well cool.....and I agree (I like them again now..I have ever since I fell for Tom Yorke's album last year)

Whilst the big record companies wander around formlessly wondering how it should be done, and suing their customers (could any commercial organisation be perceived any more negatively than RIAA, or those it represents?), Radiohead, who are now label free, have shown how it could be done (not should…those possibilities are too wide, to make that much of a definitive statement) by using the digital world to pull everything along. Who cares if they make zip out of the downloads in the very short term..look at the bigger picture, and watch it roll out.

I tried to suggest a similar thing a while back…releasing a single on Limewire and Soulseek. Blank stares moving towards clear hostility was the result. Giving a lead single away in large quantities adds to your long term currency, not detracts.

Ok, that’ll do….

Technorati Tags: Radiohead, digital downloads

Sound of silver talk to me / makes you want to feel like a teenager

So, in one quick bump of a mouse button, taking it live, the new AmazonMP3 store has relegated the iTunes store to the antiquated, to the clunky, to the potentially almost irrelevant class, although clearly that has got a long way to go with Americans who are far more subservient to Apple than the rest of the world (it’s the US, increasingly out of step, where iPod rules, whereas in much of the rest of the world it plays a distant second fiddle to the simple MP3 enabled phone)..if you want evidence of that read this head-in-the-sandism from US PC World.

I have to be honest, I’ve never been an iTunes store fan. Its interface is ridiculously slow, unresponsive, difficult to navigate, and less than intuitive. I click on a title and wait, and wait, for the obviously clogged dedicated servers to load my page.

And it never seems to offer me anything that I might want to buy. Even the tracks I know I’d probably like, look somehow less enticing than they should. It’s like one of those grim, dank record shops in small town New Zealand, full of records you don’t want which having faded full price stickers even when you know the label dropped it to mid price some time back.

Amazon, on the other hand, provides a clean, much faster, cheaper, DRM free, and visually enticing user front-end that, like my other favourite, eMusic, takes me off in a direction that I might not know I want to go it, but am often pleased I’m heading (although I’m not sure if Pink Floyd’s The Wall really sits that well in the Techno listings). It mightn't have al the bells and whistles yet but I believe the granddaddy of net commerce has much on the way..you can bet your Bezos on that.

And there is no need to download a fairly large slab of software which often needs updating. Instead, you work directly from the place you likely are already at: your browser. Even if you do have iTunes, Amazon provides a free, tiny, bit of software, that links Amazon’s shop to that device rather seamlessly.

Yep, it’s a whizz and indicative of the way the future actually lies. In the same way the Mp3 player is converging with the phone (and not the iPhone, which is a blip, albeit a pretty one, but the vasty more widely held Nokias and Motorolas and the like, which sell more units daily than the iPhone has in it’s whole retail history), the purchasing device has to operate from the browser. Retail is about removing barriers, not adding to them and the whole idea that you need a program designated purely for music purchase and playback is increasingly ludicrous. AmazonMP3 (smart name too) simply nails that.

And ain’t it funny how quickly the parameters of the ballpark have changed in the past few months, from the iPhone buzz where the Jobs’ disciples went completely ga-ga, hailing the future as cometh, angrily slapping doen any who dared to question the oracle, to this, some five months later, where that device now smells so very yesterday, no matter how cutsie the things might be. The iPhone was as much of a threat to Nokia as the iMac is to Microsoft...actually that's not true..it's much much less. It's like Fiji declaring war on China.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love my iPod and I think many will do so for a long time, but I know a) how I’m going to fill it (and it ain’t from Mr. Job’s store), and b) what direction I’m going to go in when it’s time to replace it.

As an update: as of this morning Amazon have blocked any non-US purchases..prior to that, putting 90210 down as one's code did the trick. Royalty stuff, easily offended majors and the like of course, but for virtually every other transaction in the world, its now a global market. I do wonder when the record companies will wake up to that. Technology could take care of royalty issues in a snip, but I guess there needs to be a will.

 

Technorati Tags: AmazonMP3, iPod, iTunes

saturday / saturday / saturday

Sheeit, Elton John wants to close down the Internet

I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span.

Don't let the sun go down on me? I think it already has, old chap....

Technorati Tags: Elton John, luddites

I'm in the phone booth / it's the one across the hall

From the NZ Herald today:

AT&T, the telecoms company with which Apple has teamed up to offer its much-hyped new iPod-cum-mobile phone, revealed that it activated 146,000 of the devices in the first two days - the last two days of June.

The number was mentioned as an aside in AT&T's financial results for the second quarter of the year, but it caused an immediate reaction on the stock market, where Apple shares plunged 5 per cent.

Analysts had believed US sales of the iPhone that first weekend had been anything from 300,000 to 700,000. Even allowing that some iPhones may not have been immediately activated - either due to glitches at AT&T or because they were being purchased for resale on eBay - it seems clear that Wall Street had been taken in by the hype surrounding the product's launch.

What a surprise...not....Apple's Zune cometh...

picking out people and knocking them down / resisting arrest as they're kicked on the ground

I linked a few days back to Andrew Dubber’s interview at Hometracked, and mentioned his downloadable free e-book, on the new industry, and ways to navigate such. Since then Andrew has found himself in the middle of quite some little Internet firestorm. It all started when he posted a link to a post on a site called Download Squad. The story had to do with a lawsuit a certain Ms. Del Cid of Florida is filing against the RIAA to counter an action the US industry body is taking against her.

The piece on Download Squad is worded as a perfectly straightforward news story with a few opinions thrown in there, the strongest being

The RIAA has been terrorizing many people who they knew didn't have anything to do with alleged copyright violations, including dead people, young children, and the elderly.

Which, I guess from the RIAA’s POV, is strong stuff, but really no more so than what is more less generally publicly perceived. The RIAA has been roundly criticised across the spectrum for the way it’s pursued downloaders, often very insignificant, and the merciless persecution of people who's lives would likely be ruined by the action.

Andrew’s blog’s primary focus is the way the new technology can be utilised to advantage by artists and labels, and a story like this is clearly highly relevant as the result of the suit could potentially be precedent setting. So he linked to the story.

However a certain Paul Birch, owner of an independent UK label, Revolver Records, took exception to the link and so began the astounding email discourse which can be found here. Mr Birch is also a board member of the IFPI…the international body representing the record industry.

The back and forth was gob smacking, Mr Birch, clearly a man of some standing in the UK’s industry was at times abusive, threatening, irrational and contradictory. But the upshot was that he gave the impression of an unpleasant bully threatening to shut Andrew down, and make a complaint to his employers simply because Andrew linked to a site making a comment, under the provisions, I guess, in the US, of the First Amendment. It was very ugly and unnecessary. And Andrew was never less than polite and completely professional in responses.

Mr Birch says, amongst other things:

I think that what is more desirable is to take down links from your site that promote this hatred of the recording Industry, because the assumption is that by linking to them that you support the extreme view heralded.

Really?

Andrew sent through, with Mr Birch’s permission, the conversation as a part of his regular blog email updates, and I received it on Saturday evening.

With 24 hours it had gone around the world, was highly placed on digg, had a thread on the US Industry forum, Velvet Rope, and had hit dozens of blogs.

Paul Birch was famous and for all the wrong reasons. He was, universally derided for both his stance and his nasty bullying; Andrew’s site crashed for 24 hours because of excess traffic and Mr Birch had given the original story brand new legs.

None of which seems surprising because looking at Revolver’s terribe website and their half baked My Space, they are truly luddites, dinosaurs…the world has passed them by. A major independent UK label which has virtually no web presence, and what there is includes a bunch of badly formatted links to various copyright issues. This guy doesn't understand the modern world, but he seems to be aggressively obsessed by tilting at it.

And as if anything could be more indicative of the hole the record industry finds itself it, and is digging ever larger every day, our luddite bully boy is on the board of the world’s recording industry body (I must tell the story of the time a Blam Blam Blam member asked the president of said body if he had any drugs…but not now), which of course includes the RIAA as it’s largest member. The same body which is accused, on paper, screen, and now in the courts of threatening and bullying behaviour. Gosh…..

As an opinionated aside, looking at Revolver and its subsidiary, the imaginatively named “Heavy Metal Records” (a forthcoming album on the page due for release in Jan 2006!), it’s hard not to want to throw some of the blame for any pain Mr Birch might be feeling back in his A&R face. What an appalling catalogue of shabby dated acts, dodgy live recordings, fallen acts' re-recordings of their hits and the like…and he’s on the board of the IFPI.

It speaks volumes, no?

Update:

A day later Andrew found himself explaining basic copyright parameters to Mr Birch

 

Technorati Tags: RIAA, IFPI, downloading, Andrew Dubber