Bryan Josh in the Independent

That band readers of this blog with have heard of by now get a mention in an Independent article claiming that in the age of downloading, the CD is far from dead.

Someone who does make a living from his albums is Bryan Josh, the leader of the nu-prog-rock band Mostly Autumn who, over nine years of diligent touring, have built up enough of a following to fill places like London’s Astoria, without any major-label assistance. This week’s Heart Full of Sky album is their sixth studio one.

“It has been full-time for five years now,” Josh explains. “We fund the band through record sales and ticket sales, selling albums at concerts and through our website. That generates enough money to enable the band to keep going. For the initial funding of an album, we make a special limited edition – the last one was two and a half thousand – and sell them first, which covers our costs. Then afterwards we release a standard edition on general release.

“If it goes as normal, we’ll probably do about 12,500 of Heart Full of Sky. Anything above that depends on publicity and radio-play. But we generate our fanbase from people coming to see us, which is the best way. We do two main tours a year, and some festivals, writing and recording the albums in between. It keeps us busy – too busy, in fact, so we’re trying to reduce the number of dates we do, but do bigger ones, because we like to put on a good light show.”

‘nu-prog’? That’s a new genre on me. I prefer the ‘York/Swansea Sound’, since there are enough bands in it to qualify as a ‘scene’.

As for the general thrust of the Independant article; no, the CD album is not dying. What downloading might kill off is the sorts of albums made up from two or three singles plus a load of filler. We may see a return to the days when the music world is split into ‘singles artists’ whose work is largely downloaded, and ‘album artists’, who will continue to sell most of their work on CD.