Tag Archives: The Music Business

Stupid Music Journalist Quote of the Day

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Tim Hall

Comes from The Guardian’s Mark Beaumont, in a blog post about Radiohead’s Kid A

By the mid-noughties, just like the mid-90s, alternative and mainstream were conjoined by a frothing mass media and shrinking major-label budgets – there seemed little distance between Kasier Chief and Sugababe, between Arctic Monkey and Crazy Frog. There was nowhere for an underground to be.

That really does speak wonders about the smallness of cultural bubble that “mainstream” music critics inhabit, doesn’t it? Just about all the music I love just simply doesn’t exist as far as they’re concerned.

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Time to bring back Top of the Pops?

Posted on September 12, 2010 by Tim Hall

On The Guardian website Miranda Sawyer campaigns for a return of Top of the Pops. Unfortunately she spoils a good argument with the mistaken opinion that The Mercury Music Prize represents the sole valid alternative to Simon Cowell’s X-Factor, and they are the only two games in town.

I’m not sure if the Top of the Pops format will work today, but we desperately need something to reverse the situation in the past decade whereby the general music-buying population is more or less completely cut out of the loop in determining which records and artists become successful.

With records played to death on the radio before they’re even released, we’ve reached the point where everything mainstream audiences get to hear is decided in advance by a very small number of elite tastemakers from the record companies and the media. The Mercury Music prize gives every appearance of being run by this same clique.

What was great about TOTP was the way it used a strict formula based on chart position to decide who appeared on it – nobody got vetoed because a clique of cloth-eared idiots from BBC light entertainment thought they didn’t fit the show’s format. If enough fans went out and bought the record, they got on. So we had Mötorhead on prime-time TV playing “Ace of Spades”, something which would be unthinkable now.

What’s very notable is the way the BBC marginalises genres like metal, jazz, blues or folk, despite their popularity up and down the country, in favour of various flavours of ‘indie’, which is all they think exists as an alternative to X-Factor pop. Yes, they might do the odd BBC3 documentary, but they tend to be very nostalgia-orientated, and don’t feature up and coming acts. Look at their festival coverage. For example, there was an eclectic mix of artists at Glastonbury this year, but you’d never have known it from the bands shown on TV.

Maybe genres have become so fragmented in today’s net-connected multi channel world that a crossover hit like “Ace of Spades” simply isn’t possible any more. But surely the best music of all genres deserves better than being trapped in separate musical ghettos?

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What is the point of The Mercury Music Prize?

Posted on September 9, 2010 by Tim Hall

What is the point of The Mercury Music Prize?

I’m not going to comment on the merits or otherwise of winners The XX – they’re so far removed from my own tastes in music that I’m simply not qualified to judge them. But I think it is fair to comment on the very obvious exclusion of entire genres from Mercury shortlists.

Apart from the token jazz and folk entries, it does seem dominated by various sub-genres of indie plus the odd hip-hop record. Far from being as broad as it’s apologies claim, it’s pretty much restricted to the sorts of artists that Apple Macintosh-owning urban metrosexuals might have heard of. I recognise that prog is too niche, but it’s unthinkable, for example, for a metal band to make the shortlist. Admittedly a lot of cutting-edge metal seems to be Scandinavian these days, and The Mercury is restricted to British and Irish acts. But why have Iron Maiden never got nominated? And when was the last time an out-and-our pop album got nominated? Surely Simon Cowell’s karaoke drivel hasn’t killed pop completely?

Alexis Petridis’s Guardian Article gives the game away – he doesn’t quite come and out and say it, but I think the subtext and inference is pretty clear. The main purpose of The Mercury Music Prize is indeed not to celebrate the best of British music in all it’s diversity, but is merely a cynical ploy to sell records to the demographic that doesn’t know much about music, but wants to think of itself as cool and sophisticated.

Which is a perfect justifcation of why, despite the genre’s eternal popularity, you’re never going to get a Metal band in Mercury shortlist. Metal just isn’t a genre you can sell to people like David Cameron or William Hague.

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Whither mFlow

Posted on September 5, 2010 by Tim Hall

I’ve been using mFlow for several months now (you can see my profile here). I’ve described it as “the bastard offspring of Spotify, iTunes and Twitter. It combines Twitter-style social networking, online music streaming and mp3 sales. It’s actually great fun, and has exposed me to a number of artists whose music I’d never have heard otherwise.

The way it works is people “flow” tunes to their followers, who can then listen to the complete song. Following works like it does on Twitter – it’s completely asymmetric, in that there’s no obligation to follow someone back if they choose to follow you. Follow friends, or follow random people who have great taste in music, it’s up to you. If you really like a song, you can reflow it to your own followers, or purchase it as a DRM-free mp3 download, And when someone buys a track, whoever flowed it gets a 20% commission on the sale.

It has two big drawbacks at the moment. Firstly, their catalogue is nothing like as comprehensive as I’d like it to be – while they have three of the four majors and many of the larger indies on board, it gets very spotty once you get down to smaller labels and independent artists. There is practically nothing from female-fronted prog scene I follow; currently there’s a single song by The Reasoning taken from a compilation, and one cover by Magenta, and that’s it. Not even Fish’s post-EMI releases are there. These are precisely the sort of artists I’d love to be able to use mFlow to spread the word about.

Secondly, it’s currently UK only, and my online friends network isn’t constrained by geographical boundaries; I’ve got online friends in America and continental Europe who share my tastes in music, and can’t use mFlow yet.

Now iTunes have introduced something called “Ping” which seems to do much of the same thing, there are fears that it could damage mFlow. iTunes is the 800lb gorilla in the downloading market, keen to lock everyone in their closed proprietary ecosystem, and are quite likely to stomp on a startup who’s established a niche that they want for themselves. Let’s hope mFlow survives.

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The Digital Economy Bill: The Costs of a Terrible Mistake

Posted on April 11, 2010 by Tim Hall

In The Costs of a Terrible Mistake, Doug Richard expresses all the same concerns as in my previous post. Only rather better-articulated. And he doesn’t mince his words in the conclusion.

There was no need to rush this legislation through except that someone, somewhere wanted to get passed under the wire. Someone wanted a bad law in place, and in the wrapping up of parliament it happened.

That is devastating.

And people think I’m overreacting when I call for a boycott of the “Big four” record companies (Sony, EMI, Warners and Universal). While I’m sure there are other vested interests in play, especially the cynically calculated evil of Rupert Murdoch, there does seem to be smoking gun incriminating the major labels, who may have given us some great music in the past, but are now dinosaurs willing to trash the future in order to postpone the extinction they so richly deserve.

There are many lifetimes’ worth of great music released by smaller labels and independent artists – we don’t need the majors any more, and a boycott is far less than they deserve. Not as dismissal of ‘mainstream’ music as an act of musical snobbery, but a refusal to give any of my money to businesses who act in such a disgraceful way.

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Why they review what they review.

Posted on March 24, 2010 by Tim Hall

An article on The Guardian Media Site has turned into an interesting tangential discussion on exactly how The Guardian decides on what to and what not to review.

Film and Music editor Michael Hann came up with this gem:

Other albums that “have to be reviewed” are the ones that are achingly hip, or from artists one would expect to see reviewed in the Guardian – the likes of Bonnie “Prince” Billy, for example.

This drew a wonderful spleen-filled response one noted metal fan, to which Hann responded.

And features are actually a better way of contextualising minority interest musics than reviews are, especially when accompanied – as our features usually are – by a playlist.

Which ignores the fact that hipster-indie is as much a minority interest music as metal. Except that the groupthinking Guardian writers don’t seem to be able to realise this.

So far, I haven’t had a response to exactly why they “have to review” Bonnie “Prince” Billy, but did not have space to review Opeth’s “Watershed”. A cursory glance at the sorts of tour venues the two artists play suggests both are of similar standing in terms of audience style.  While I know popularity isn’t everthing, I cannot see how the relative merits of progressive death metal vs.lo-fi indie folk are down to anything other than purely subjective taste.

Or is it simply Opeth are further from their comfort zone than hipster-indie?

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Please pull the flush now, for the sake of music!

Posted on March 2, 2010 by Tim Hall

Next time you hear some record company marketing suit spouting canards about filesharing destroying the music industy and claiming that major labels companies are on the same side as the artists, point them at this post about Hollie Smith being screwed over by EMI.

So a couple of months after signing, they came through and said ‘hey we think you’ve got a lot of potential, we want someone to write you a radio single and start doing the whole radio-friendly single thing’.

“I said ‘well, give me a month and I’ll write you a couple and you can say if they’re adequate or not. And if that’s the case, then sweet and if not, let’s talk about the idea of someone else writing my stuff because I don’t want a cheesy pop song that’s totally irrelevant to the rest of the album’.

They were like, ‘cool, cool, cool’. I sent them over some stuff and I hadn’t heard back from them and I rung them again and said ‘what’s happening?’ And they’re like ‘oh we’ve decided not to release your album at all internationally’.

Read the whole thing.  The sooner EMI are flushed down the toilet history, the better.

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Götterdämmerung for the Major Record Labels

Posted on February 14, 2010 by Tim Hall

With EMI apparently about to go belly-up, and Warner Group pulling out of streaming sites (Which strikes me as an act of desperation), we seem to be approaching the endgame of their battle to retain dominance of the music industry.

This post, which exhorts the publishing industry not to go down the same route, explains where the music business went wrong, and how and why the adopted a business model dependent on maximising the sales of the smallest possible roster of artists, and why they determine which new artists will be ‘successes’ in advance by deciding who gets the multi-million pound hype campaign.  But along came broadband internet, and it fatally undermined their model. Now someone can go to Spotify, listen to, say, the most recent album by, say, The Killers, and decide it’s not worth buying.

Some people have said that without the major labels and their advances the only recorded music will be cheap and nasty recordings made on laptops in people’s bedrooms.  No way will people be able to put together ambitious albums with things like string sections.  I point such people at Karnataka’s “The Gathering Light”.  Go and listen to the song Moment in Time which the band have made streamable on last.fm.  Great production, complete with string sections.  Karnataka are not signed to a major label. They’re not even on an indie.  “The Gathering Light” is self-released and self-financed. Yes, it cost a quite a bit of money to record, but nevertheless the band managed to raise the money, and didn’t need a record company advance to do it.

But in today’s music climate I cannot imagine an album like that being released on a major label. What will happen is that at some record company marketing meeting chaired by a cloth-eared MBA graduate, they’ll say something like “27.8 percent of our target demographic doesn’t like guitar solos, so all those solos will have to go”. Then it will be “If there are ten minute songs there’s a 17.9% chance the Tesco’s might refuse to sell it”. And so on. The end result will be something bland and homogeneous, sounding like a poor man’s Coldplay.

Music will survive the extinction of the dinosaurs, and in the past decade the mice and birds have been doing perfectly well in their shadow.  The past decade may have been one of worst in history as far as the mainstream has been concerned, with record companies putting out nothing but overhyped cookie-cutter pabulum, but below the radar all sorts of music has been flourishing.

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The Death of the Record Shop

Posted on December 28, 2009 by Tim Hall

While spending the new year with my parents in my old home town on Slough, I wandered up to Town Centre, to discover that town’s principle (and indeed, only) record shop, a branch of the HMV chain, has gone.

Chimpomatic.com notes it’s sad demise

I live in the 52nd most populated settlement in the UK – the much maligned Berkshire town of Slough – a community with a population of around 126,000 people, roughly 50% ‘Caucasian’ and 50% ‘Asian / Other’. When I moved here 15 years ago, Slough was able to support at least 6 record shops including an outlet for each of the major chains – HMV, Virgin, Our Price – plus several indie shops including the magnificent Slough Record Centre on the Farnham Road. Last month the HMV store in the main shopping centre shut up shop and removed the racks – a shabby printed note on the shutters proclaiming that Slough residents need not worry, they could take the train to Windsor to buy records from the HMV there. Slough residents will need to take the train because the HMV was the last record shop left in town (with the exception of one remaining Asian music record shop).

We keep reading about the death of the high street record shop, but you don’t take such claims seriously until you see it happen in the place where you’ve grown up. I suppose this is the down side of buying more and more music directly from the bands. So, is losing the high street record shop an acceptable price for smaller bands being economically viable?

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Mandy’s Law, and why it’s a Very Bad Thing

Posted on November 25, 2009 by Tim Hall

A lot’s been said recently about Peter Mandelson’s so-called “Digital Economy” bill, a Big Media wishlist allegedly concocted on a yacht in Corfu at David Geffen’s expense.

Charlie Stross and Steve Lawson have expressed strong opinions on what it’s likely to mean for creative artists who aren’t megastars. Go and read what they’ve written.

I’ve heard people dismiss concerns about this bill as pure hysteria and panicky scaremongering, suggesting that if you don’t download, you’ve nothing to fear. Yeah, they say that about ID cards as well.  How many people still buy that one?

Mandy’s Law has the potential for enormous collateral damage. For starters, I have no confidence in their ability to distinguish between legal and illegal downloads without generating a great many false positives. While industry apologists claim they’re only going to target a small number of heavy downloaders I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if they used the same shotgun approach as they’ve used with DCMA takedown notices in the past. After some rudimentary traffic analysis they’ll just assume everything that appears to be a music file but isn’t from some whitelist of industry-approved download sites must be an illegal download. And out will go potentially millions of nastygrams threatening disconnection.

Think I’m exaggerating?  I work in the software industry, as a tester. I know all about bugs in complex software, which is more than can be said for a technological illiterate like Peter Mandelson.

It’s likely have a chilling effect on MP3 blogging, which admittedly inhabits a legal grey area, but who’s absence will limit the exposure of new bands.  The false positive risk may even discourage unsigned bands from giving away free downloads, for fear that fans may be disconnected because www.myobscureindieband.com isn’t on some secret whitelist.

Of course, for the cartel of big media companies, that’s not even an unintended consequence – adding a lot of additional hassle for unsigned bands works very much in their favour.

It’s OK for industry shills to claim that this won’t happen, but I’m not willing to give sweeping powers to the music biz on a vague promise that they won’t be evil. Their past track record means they simply do not have my trust.

I also have a problem with the whole issue of collective punishment and guilty-unless-proved-innocent. The typical filesharer is a kid living with parents, or a perpetually-skint student in a shared house. The threat of collective punishment for entire households effectively conscripts everyone into being unwilling enforcers of an unpopular law. At the risk of breaking Godwin’s law, it’s the way the Nazis enforced order in occupied France in World War II.  Hyperbole, maybe, but when you hear filesharing compared to terrorism…

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