Music Blog

It appears that the new Tory leader, David Cameron, is a fan of generic corporate indie.

“The last album I bought was Hot Fuss by the Killers,” says Cameron, whose deeply presentable appearance hides the fact that he spent much of his adolescence listening to bands like the Clash and the Specials. “The Killers are very good and quite energetic, and I tend to listen to that kind of music in the car to forget about work and keep me awake. The Snow Patrol album is also excellent, and I like Radiohead.”

I thought Tories of his generation were supposed to be Iron Maiden fans.

Worse still, he’s a Smiths fan…

But perhaps the most surprising revelation was David Cameron’s penchant for “miserable” music by Radiohead, Pulp and The Smiths – all well-known critics of the Conservatives. Smiths singer Morrissey once recorded a song about Margaret Thatcher called “Margaret on the Guillotine”.

Unfortunately last night’s show by The Mars Volta was cancelled due to vocalist Omar Rodruiguez-Lopez being sick. For once the ticket agency earned their ‘booking fee’ by phoning me on my mobile just before I set out, saving me a wasted journey into town. The gig is supposedly going to be rescheduled, presumably some time in the new year.

In 25 years, this is the first gig I’ve even had tickets for that’s been cancelled. I guess this is one benefit of not being a Guns and Roses Fan. Nearest one was Fish about five years ago, when he canned the rest of the tour due to voice problems immediately after the night I saw him.

If you’ve had problems ordering stuff from Fish recently, here’s why. In the latest email from Fish, he explains why things went pear-shaped.

Up until last week I have been unable to provide details regarding a situation that began to unfold in June this year and which has dominated my life since. Due to a legal action being in progress I was restricted from providing information that would explain the problems I have been encountering with the fan club merchandising service since the beginning of 2004. Problems which have enraged a lot of my fans and badly damaged my business and career in both financial and professional terms. I was very aware last year of the continuing complaints against our mail order service; complaints which grew in intensity in the summer of 2004 and resulted in a total loss of confidence from our business customers. At the time I was informed by my office manager – Kim Waring – that the problems lay with the postal and courier services and trusted her judgement. I backed her, despite a highly vocal outcry amongst the fans on various web sites and forums and publicly denounced those who were attacking our service. I now find my confidence was not only severely misplaced but in fact cynically betrayed by someone I considered not only a valued employee but also a friend and confidante. I am severely embarrassed by this revelation and would like to extend my sincere apologies to those whom I berated during the period concerned. Up until June this year when Kim Waring handed in her notice I had absolutely no idea of what had been going on behind my back while I was on tour and even while I was working in the studio.

I’ve worked for a small company that’s been the victim of fraud by a dishonest employee, and seen from first hand the consequences of such a betrayal of trust. In that case, he got found out early on before he’s had the chance to do too much damage to the company’s finances or reputation. (I’ve also worked for a company who’s CEO ended up in jail for fraud, but that was another story) Fish’s case sounds an order of magnitude worse.

BBC are showing a documentary tonight about lunatic fringe metal bands, centering on the tale of a bunch of Italian cretins called “Beasts of Satan” that ended in murder. And this, of course, has given the media the change to trot out all those lazy clichés yet again.

BBC News quotes one Michele Tollis:

“No one can contradict me when I say that heavy metal and satanism are closely linked. They’re inseparable,” he says.

The Guardian’s Sarah Dempster is even worse; she turns up the bad cliché knob all the way up to 11

Perhaps the most startling realisation to spring from this fog bank of ridiculousness is that heavy metal has, over the past 35 years, barely changed at all. While pop, dance and rap have all grown, diversified and experimented with fashionable trousers, metal has remained in a state of suspended adolescence, clinging like lichen to its black jeans and refusing to relinquish a MO so primordial it’s probably scrawled on a cave wall somewhere near Birmingham, accompanied by a chalk drawing of a shouting Neanderthal that looks, coincidentally, a bit like Tony Iommi. Death metal (a relatively recent variant birthed in the late 1980s) may have upped the ugg-factor by swapping proper singing for singing like an illiterate serf describing a stampede of wild boars, but its primary fixations – pseudo-demonism, third-form nihilism, angry boffing and white trainers – form the pubescent marrow in a bony chain that links everyone from Cradle Of Filth and Slayer to Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath.

It appears that Sarah Dempster, just like Beasts of Satan themselves, doesn’t get metal. It’s not meant to be taken seriously. Heavy metal at it’s best has always been pantomime, and most fans recognise this. Has Sarah Dempster ever been to an Iron Maiden gig?

Like a lot of things, it’s a moronic minority that give everyone else a bad name. How many murders have been committed by football hooligans? The figure runs into hundreds over the years. Yet nobody suggests that football fandom itself is responsible for the thuggish behaviour of a minority of so-called fans. When was the last time you heard of large numbers heavy metal fans being drunkenly abusive towards everyone else after a gig? When was the centre of any major city turned into a no-go area when Metallica were in town?

So goes the refrain of a certain work colleague who shall remain nameless, when he heard I’d been to see Marillion. He accuses me, quite wrongly, of living in the 1970s.

Nonsense! Here are some of the bands I’ve seen or will be seeing this year:

• Rammstein, only three (or is it four) albums so far
• Porcupine Tree, who I think you’ll find started in the 90s
• Marillion, who played nothing from earlier than 1989
• The Mars Volta, who have only been going for about 18 months
• Mostly Autumn, first album 1996
• Paradise Lost, yet another 1990s band

So what’s this ‘modern’ music I’m supposed to be listening to instead? Turns out it’s the likes of Franz Ferdinand and The Kaiser Chiefs. In other words, ridiculously overhyped reheated 80s new wave pastiche, doing nothing that the likes of XTC or Magazine didn’t do 25 years ago. I find Franz Ferdinand boring and shallow, all style and no substance. And while The Kaiser Chiefs “I predict a one hit wonder” might be a decent song, they’re no better overall than The Darkness.

I fail to see why Rammstein, Porcupine Tree or The Mars Volta is dated and old-fashioned, while the current crop of retro four-chord poseurs is considered state of the art. Perhaps some people need to tune out the media hype.

I’ve suspected this for a while, but this study by Cambridge PhD Economics researcher Rufus Pollock (link from Boing Boing) seems to confirm it. Filesharing won’t reduce overall music sales, but it does threaten the business model of the major record companies.

In particular, the point estimates imply that the median ‘new’ artist, whose weekly sales are 2,163 albums, would see a decrease in weekly sales of 101 albums per week were files shared to be reduced by 10%. A similar calculation can be made for an artist of maximum popularity. At the median level of sales for these artist, the estimate implies an increase in sales of 490 albums per week if file sharing were to be reduced by 10%. This stark contrast between the magnitudes of the effects for artists of varying levels of popularity highlights the importance of this heterogeneity in estimating the aggregate effects of file sharing.

A similar calculation can be made for estimating the total effect of file sharing on sales. To estimate the aggregate effect of a 30% reduction in file sharing across the board,33 I simply subtract out the effect of the deleted files from the second stage estimation in Table 4 and then aggregate up to market level numbers using the appropriate weights. The estimated effect of such an across-the- board reduction in file sharing is to increase aggregate sales by 15%. Again, while these calculations were useful for placing the analysis inside the framework of the previous literature, they do not take into account competition effects across albums, and so the effects of file sharing will be overstated in these estimates.

In other words, filesharing reduces sales for the small minority of overhyped corporate rock megastars, but increases the sales of hardworking smaller bands. Which is just what the big record companies fear. They’ve developed a business model that depends on maximising sales of as small a roster of artists as possible.

Since anything not ‘mainstream’ doesn’t get played on format-driven corporate radio. the only way much of it can be heard either by people risking money on buying an album unheard, or by ‘try before you buy’ filesharing. Which is just what the big companies don’t want. People might start buying self-financed music rather than Madonna, Metallica or whatever four-chords-that-sold-a-million-that-sounds-like-Coldplay-now that they’re trying to hype. And that would never do….

I’m just about to head into town to see Van der Graaf Generator at the Bridgewater Hall. As a work colleague who shall be nameless said, it should be a hair-raising experience. I hope to put up a review tomorrow night.