Song, by Toad

Scottish Internets A-Buzz With Music

There seem to be a lot of things happening on the internet in and around the Scottish music scene at the moment.  This is nice, because for a while it seemed like the only real participants in McMusic 2.0 were the old stagers like myself, 17 Seconds, The Vinyl Villain, The Pop Cop, And Before the First Kiss (RIP for now) and Manic Pop Thrills.  We can welcome a couple of new sites to the fold as well, in the form of The Steinberg Principle, Across the Kitchen Table and Scottish Friction.  There are the more venerable organs such as Is This Music? and Jock Rock as well, but it seemed like ages since we’d been fed any fresh meat.  There are a few others run by professional journalists, such as Spins ‘n’ Needles, Broon’s Tunes and Lots of Random Words, but they seem for the most part to be places to store their writings for other people, rather than sites with a focus of their own.

It’s all quite old school though: essentially the text from what would have been a magazine or a fanzine of days gone by has simply been moved to the internet which, although it’s an improvement in many ways, is hardly revolutionary.

There are two reasons I think that a lot of this isn’t quite stretching the internet to its full capability just yet.  Firstly, community.  One of the key things the internet can do which traditonal media could never do is to build a community out of the readership who actually get to participate in the project itself.

Some of the blogs mentioned above, and this one as well, go some way to achieving this sense of community.  The Vinyl Villain is probably the best I can think of, in terms of bringing disparate people together and letting them become friends simply by virtue of reading the same website.  It’s not an easy thing to do, and JC has done it very well indeed, but the undisputed kings are the Fence Collective, whose web presence has really helped cement the community of musicians and fans together.  It probably wasn’t really intended to be when it started, but their Beef Board is a masterpiece of Web 2.0 savvy.  And this from a label that doesn’t even sell mp3s.

The other thing which most of the sites mentioned so far really lack is any kind of multimedia.  I am trying, but a look at the BBC’s Homegame Sessions shows you what I mean.  Since the iPlayer they are pretty much the masters of this universe as far as I can tell, and a splendid example of how to bring together print, video and audio in one fairly seamless package.

Recently there have been some new additions to the tartan interwebs, however, which promise to help push us collectively forward a little.

Off the Beaten Tracks – with whom I have collaborated on a couple of Homegame Sessions – is offering live video sessions and band profiles, exploiting the rather amazing Edinburgh architecture to create some really distinctive videos.  The Malcolm Middleton ones from Homegame can be seen here.

Glasgow Podcart – this is more of an arts and music blog, giving it a broader scope, which I like.  They combine their visual, written and podcast material really well.  This is a bit more Web 2.0, if you ask me, although they shower this train wreck of a site with compliments in this episode, so their judgment does seem to leave just a little to be desired.

Products of a Gaseous Brain – Milo will be shocked rigid and make protestations of amateurish bumbling when he sees me put him forward as an example of what a blog can and should be.  It may be rough, but there’s video, podcasts, writing, reviews, random bollocks and everything.  Apart from one unfortunate error, where he interviews yours truly on his podcast, this is a consistently excellent site.

So there we go, things are starting to move forward in this part of the world.  It’s good too, because these new ventures should spur on those of us who have been around for a few year now to do better and more interesting things.  It’s all about ideas these days, and there are some very good ones knocking around at the moment.

That Sony Meeting

Well because of the intervention of Homegame this post has been somewhat delayed, so apologies for that, so here we go.

Firstly a brief description of the circumstances.  A little while ago, London-based Winston’s Zen was the victim of another of those DMCA take-down hits.  Due to connections he was able to actually get through to the label at the source, Columbia Records, part of Sony BMG, and they invited him in to talk to them and suggested he bring along a couple of other bloggers and make something of a meeting out of it.  So last Thursday myself, Winston himself, Jamila from Fucking Dance and Tim from The Blue Walrus went along, the Sony people booked a table in a pub and we talked about stuff and drank ourselves into a stupour.

And what did we achieve?  Well honestly, I’d say not an awful lot, really.  We chatted, but I am not sure either side had much of a concrete idea of what we wanted to get out of the meeting, so it was little more than a start, I’d say.  Some thoughts, though: more »

If You Build It, They Will Come

The key word in that phrase, of course, is if.  There are a massive number of people in the fucking internet age, however, who seem to think that intending to build it is reason enough for people to come and it is really, really getting on my nerves.

Bloggers start blogs, write five posts, and then start making demands about being listed in the Hype Machine or elbo.ws directories immediately, despite it being incredibly fucking clear that it’s going to take at least two months before they’ll even consider you. They are important services and drive a lot of traffic to your site, so I can understand the desire, but please just show some fucking patience.  At least create something of substance before clamouring for people to shower you with praise.

This happens when penis-brained publicists get their hands on a small but promising band as well: the uber-hard sell comes out to play.  “Greatest band ever, set to explode!“  And not infrequently this band has no more than a small handful of songs to their name.

Venture capital-backed start-ups promise to REVOLUTIONISE online music sales/sharing/funding/whatfuckingever and send out these breathless fucking emails full of wind and promises about how you’ve JUST GOT TO BE in from the start.  Do we?  Do we really have to?

People do it bands all the time.  I can get you on the radio, I can get you this, I can get you that.  And then they just stop paying any fucking attention, it all fails to materialise and the band is left with nothing.

The new mantra for the 21st Century should be more along the lines of: “I don’t care about your fucking plans, your grandiose ideas or your vacant, meaningless promises.  I don’t care what you intend to do, or about your fucking ambitions.  Go away, get your nose to the fucking grindstone and DO something.  Then talk about it.”

Can you tell I haven’t had enough sleep?

Shout Out Louds – Hurry Up, Let’s Go

The Magnetic Fields – Promises of Eternity

Micah P. Hinson – Patience

Future of Digital Media

Don’t worry, I’m not going to be tackling anything quite so ambitious in the space of a mere handful of paragraphs, so don’t worry. You can read on without fear of impending pomposity.

Basically, I was reading this little piece in the Guardian about the future of digital media, and it got me to thinking about music on television and stuff like that. Basically, there isn’t any decent music on television, is there? Jools is okay, I guess, although I find him personally annoying and don’t like many of the bands he features. There’s the kiddie ones on weekend mornings too, I think – T4 or something like that must have one. There’s also some Jo Whiley thing or other, but I can never sit through more than a few minutes of that without feeling compelled to swear at the screen and throw crisps around the place. MTV and VH1 are music-based, but don’t seem to be actually about music, so to speak, as far as I am aware.

So there are things out there, but I find myself thinking about something genuinely ‘about’ music. Something with a bit of actual content beyond music videos and trying to reflect the whims of Teh Kidz(TM). Something, I suppose, like a blog – a vlog, I think they’re rather clumsily called. Something with some chatter, some new stuff, some old stuff, a bit of news, some thinking – stuff like that. Something, I suppose I am rather self-indulgently saying, that I would want to watch. Something for actual music fans, which is where a lot of the current stuff seems to be missing the mark just slightly. more »

Why Aren’t They Moaning About the Fucking X-Factor?

In amongst all the hoo-ha over Christmas about that karaoke bimbo’s brutal bum-rape of Leonard Cohen’s wonderful Hallelujah, and the brewing legal nightmare caused by indiscriminate wielding of DMCA legislation, I started to wonder a little about the music industry, who is fighting who and why, and so on.

Of course I entirely accept the music industry’s position that evil free music is killing babies and committing acts of terrorism and so on, and that it is largely people like you and I who are to blame for Britney Spears and Robbie Williams having to lead the deprived lives of poverty and servitude into which they have so cruelly been forced in the last few years by the unlimited evils of ‘right-click, save as’. I mean, it’s just obvious, really.

One thing I don’t quite get, though, is why it is only filesharing that they hate. Apart from the impact of the music-as-data model replacing the music-as-product model, which has clearly confused and annoyed the shit out of everyone with any sort of vested interest in the latter, there has been another pretty seismic shift in the music industry in the last few years: karaoke pop shows. more »

Oh Right, That’s Why You’re Being Such Pricks

You’ve got to hand it to DC. He may be as mad as a box of frogs, but the boy has just the sort of insane, conspiracy-theorist, cynical paranoia that can make you a visionary these days. In fact, there are times when I get the impression that the world is actively trying to live up to his cynicism. Like this time.

Back on the Don’t Be Evil post, where I ranted somewhat furiously about indiscriminate and groundless wielding of DMCA notices to flush the blogosphere of certain artists’ mp3s, whether or not the mp3s were still there in the first place, DC commented saying this:

Seems to me a witch hunt has started – it must be a sign of something on the cards. Something big & expensive. Someone somewhere has a deal tied up with all concerned & they’re flexing their muscle to show they have zero tolerance in order to sate their benefactor. It simply can’t be a coincidence all these people are getting the toecap in the arse & I don’t think they woke up last Monday & decided “You know what, it’s nearly Christmas & I’m bored: let’s fuck with the bloggers”. Something’s about to launch, you mark my words.

Which, as I said at the time, seemed so paranoid that it was probably very close to the truth. Very close indeed, it turns out.

Because then the lovely Vic from Muruch noticed this press release in her inbox, peddling music website called Shockhound:

“millions of MP3s and merchandise featuring artists from the major record labels Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group and EMI Music, as well as independent labels. In addition, artists will be able to upload and sell their music directly to users… Content at launch will include reviews, music news, interviews, original programming and music videos.”

And whilst I cannot definitively link the two, they are very, very oddly coincident. Major label tie-ups… free DRM-free mp3s… you don’t think? Nah, couldn’t be.

So, without more than circumstantial evidence to base this speculation upon, it looks suspiciously like the majors saw the success of blogs, saw the launch of things like RCRDFCKNGLBL and decided they wanted a bit of the action. As Vic notes, all the artists mentioned in these vanishing post complaints are signed up to Shockhound. Mind you, lots and lots of artists are signed up to Shockhound, so that might not mean much.

Personally, I don’t give a shit what they’re trying to do. Any website that is little more than a massive shop, and which has Kaiser Chiefs, Snow Patrol, The Cure and Oasis on the front page is hardly any threat to my line of editorial, so fuck them.

Bob Dylan – Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues

Email to Columbia (& Sony BMG)

This is an email to a gentleman introduced to myself as the ‘MD of Columbia’ by the person who suggested I write him an email about the whole 17 Seconds Glasvegas fiasco. Here is what I wrote. Comments, anyone?

Dear XXXX,

I was given your email by XXXX who, having read the following post on my site, thought it would be a good thing if I got in touch with you personally regarding Glasvegas and DMCA notices issued in their name.
http://songbytoad.com/2008/10/23/dont-be-evil/

I don’t know how much you know about this, but DMCA notices are being wielded against bloggers completely indiscriminately at the moment, and as you can tell from that post people are both angry and afraid. Now, to be absolutely clear, I do not intend this to be an antagonistic email, nor am I getting in touch simply in order to shake my fist and point fingers. I genuinely would rather find an amicable solution to this situation, and I genuinely believe that the vast majority of music blog writers feel the same way. At the time I was angry, and wrong on some basic facts, but there are nevertheless a lot of things which I think need addressing and I appreciate you taking the time to read this email.

Basically, many people are having pages of their music blogs indiscriminately removed by people wielding false DMCA notices in the direction of Google and Wordpress, who host most of the blogs. In the case described in my post, a fellow Edinburgh blogger had his interview with Glasvegas from January this year erased because of old and expired links to recordings given to him freely by the band at the time. Writing a huge long interview with an unsigned band and posting their demo recordings with permission is absolutely not the behaviour of a copyright pirate, and the fact that Columbia has chosen to pursue Ed is frankly disgraceful, in my opinion. more »

Don’t Be Evil

It’s hardly surprising that I find myself saying that Google have turned their old motto, Don’t Be Evil, into something of a sad parody, rather than the idealistic mission it once used to be. It’s also a little sad that what prompts me to write is not their spineless compliance with internet censorship in China, but something a little closer to home.

Ed, writer of 17 Seconds, is the latest to fall foul of Google’s draconian, utterly corrupt and morally bankrupt policies towards copyright. A year or so ago Ed wrote an in-depth interview with Glasvegas, back when the band were shopping about a few rough demos, barely more than a whisper on the lips of a few of us up here in Scotland. Yesterday Google deleted that interview from his blog. The whole thing, without permission, without dialogue, without warning: they just deleted it and told him it was gone.

The reason they gave was that it had been the subject of a DMCA complaint from Columbia Records, presumably on the basis that the interview write up contained links to long-since removed mp3 files of Glasvegas early demo recordings of songs now on their debut album. Despite the contemptuous, disgusting nature what both Columbia and Google have done, I can’t even feel angry about this; just depressed. But this is wrong in so many ways it’s difficult to know where to start.

First and foremost, none of you should ever pay for a Columbia product ever again. Fuck them. If you feel you can’t live without their music then just download the bastard stuff illegally, better yet just live without it, but under no circumstances give these chiselling vipers a cent of your money ever again. Could someone who knows more about this correct me if I am wrong, but there is to my mind no way whatsoever that they could own the rights to those demos, which were recorded and circulated for free long before they were ever involved with the band. more »

Music Software

You know, I fucking hate iTunes.  I hate i-fucking-Tunes for much the same reason that I hate fucking Macs in general.  They are designed for people who don’t fucking know how to use Explorer, for Christ’s sake.  Or Finder or whatever the bastard is called on a Mac.

It drives me nuts.  If you import photos using iPhoto then you cannot find those files in Finder.  It’s fucking ludicrous.  You have to use the search function and then when it tells you where they are you can’t actually reach that path conventionally through Finder, it will only show you the bloody things through search. Basically, you have to use iPhoto, which I would frankly prefer not to do because then your old, imported photos end up in a different place from your new ones.  “Ah, but they’re all on iPhoto”, say the smarmy, gurning Macintosh twats.  Well I don’t fucking like i-fucking-Photo and I would like to be able to choose not to fucking use it.

iTunes is the fucking same.  It’s a spectacularly stupid program, and it refuses to let you organise your music properly.  It loses files, it won’t watch a folder properly, there’s no Explorer functionality in the left-hand sidebar, it’s fucking dreadful.  All my music in a great big long list, are you fucking joking?  Do you have any idea how much music I actually have?  I’ll get RSI in my bloody scrolling finger, you fucking turkeys.

The worst is the watch folder situation though.  Basically, everything I buy or I get sent to me goes into a folder called On Trial, which is always changing as things either get deleted or moved to another folder, for the keepers, called Music Library.  Winamp and Mediamonkey are both capable of keeping an eye on both of these folders and updating accordingly.  iTunes is incapable of doing that.  Most music fans like to organise their collections and keep things where they want them, but what use is software that can’t keep up with that.  Mediamonkey can’t be installed on a Mac at all, and I am raging because it’s brilliant software, and I want to use it.

Basically, Macs seem do be designed for people who don’t want to use computers and I fucking despise them.  I will organise my own files thank you very much, you fucking keep your playschool cartoon kiddie computer hands off the bastards.

Marc Carroll – Idiot World
Elvis Costello – How to Be Dumb
Close Lobsters – Just too Bloody Stupid

The Music Fan’s Lament #4: Decreasing Quality

Well the series bumbles on into its final installment.  I am writing this from Vancouver Airport, waiting for a connection to Portland, so what better way to fill the time than with needless blathering about things I don’t really understand.  It’s taken a while to post, but I thought I’d finish this off before getting into all the Portland stuff and forever banishing the whiff of leeks from these pages.  Well, maybe not forever, but erm, well… oh never mind.

Once again, here are the various articles that prompted this little festival of self-indulgence, so you have some idea what to expect:
A Penny For Your Thoughts by The Vinyl Villain (read the comments as well, because some of them are very thought-provoking.
Does the World Need Another Indie Band? by Tim Walker, writing in The Independent.
Why Has Modern Music Lost So Much Impact? by the Kings of A&R.
This comment, from a reader called Alex in the comment thread of my recent podcast – The Tribecast.

And here are the other posts in the series:
1. Fragmentation
2. Over Saturation
3. Hype Overload
4. Quality

#4 Decreasing Quality

Reading JC’s article in particular put me in mind of this common complaint, and some of the commenters pushed the point even further.  Modern music is shit – where are the great bands?  Where, in particular, are the next Smiths, for example?

I can’t, and won’t, argue that there is a current band that I could honestly describe as the new Smiths.  But then, there wasn’t an old Smiths either.  You are talking about the very cream of the crop – that sort of band come along maybe once a decade, don’t they?  Radiohead for the 90s, I suppose, and erm, who for the noughties?  I really am not sure, so I can see where he’s coming from in that respect.

I don’t, predictably enough, agree entirely though.  One of the things JC seems to be doing, as do a lot of the people who criticise a living music scene by comparing it unfavourably to the past, is ignoring the fact of hindsight.  It’s easy to tell that the Smiths were something special, because we can look back on anything and everything that was around at the time and evaluate them in a relatively dispassionate way – something we just can’t do for anything current.  The Stone Roses first and the early Radiohead albums stand up very strongly in retrospect, but as we get closer to the present day how can we tell how good the bands are that we’re listening to now?

A couple of the groups mentioned in the comment thread on JC’s post are DeVotchKa and Calexico, but these bands are both a good solid handful of albums into their careers by now.  Think back over the last couple of years and the records that made real impact: LCD Soundsystem, Arctic Monkeys, Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire, The White Stripes – all these bands have pretty broad appeal, but only the White Stripes are more than a couple of albums into their careers, and we just don’t know who is going to be remembered from this era yet.  If the Arctic Monkeys continue to peter out, then maybe they’ll be forgotten about altogether.  It would just take one more brilliant album from any of these groups to cement their reputation as one of the really key bands of the first decade of this century.  Do we really think that the riff from Seven Nation Army is going to be less memorable in ten years than Johnny Marr’s equally iconic performance on How Soon is Now?  I know there’s more to genius that a few memorable riffs, but I think the more general point still stands.

The other question is this: who even remembers the Kasabian of the 80s anyway?  We can look back on the 90s now and identify bands like Blur and Pulp, Radiohead and early James as iconic and brilliant.  But how many Menswears and Kula Shakers are we consigning to the dustbins of forgetfullness in order to do so?  If no-one gives much of a fuck about the View now, then their memory may not survive the next full moon, never mind twenty years worth of rosy-tinted nostaligia.

Then again, as popular entertainment has made ever-greater inroads into the world of indie, having realised that there was a sizable market out there that their dancing karaoke whores were not capable of suitably exploiting, it seems that the world of indie is being over-run by preening, prancing piss-artists like the Hoosiers, Joe Lean and the Short Tight Pants, that one who’s pumping, er… Kate Moss.  Whoever they are.  They’re shit, anyway.  This is indie rock as commerical product, but it must be remembered that in no meaningful way is it actually indie.  It’s a branch of the celebrity industry, approached as such, and does not deserve our attention.  The bands are in it for the fame, the coke and the floosies, the music is fucking dreadful, and the marketing spend in proportion to investment in the actual ‘product’ is repellently high.  This last one is always a good metric to use when considering whether or not something might just be fucking rubbish.

At the other end of the scale, there are a lot of piss-poor bedroom bands reaching out using MySpace and the like, and we have a lot more contact with them than before because they can reach us directly.  They don’t need the middle-man, who might just have pointed out that they are shit, and so our MySpace inboxes are clogged with shit by groups that barely deserve to call themselves bands, nevermind command anyone’s ears.

If you’re used to listening to all this stuff because you want the buzz of that one exciting discovery, then you really do have to stop moaning and just accept it.  The people who got to be the arbiters of what was and wasn’t worth our time before the internet all had to wade through this stuff, so if we want to liberate ourselves from being told what to like, then we have to do the work that goes with it.  With great power comes gr… er, sorry, wrong speech.  The other option is to quitchabitchin and just find a few bloggers and a couple of radio stations that you trust and let them do it for you.  If you want to participate, you are just going to have to put the time in to listen.

So although I wouldn’t say that there are fewer great bands out there, I would certainly concede that we have exposure to far more really shit ones.  But as for greatness, I just don’t think we can tell right now what is going to be remembered in twenty years.  And I also think we conveniently forget all the crap that there was milling about on the airwaves at the time we thought the Smiths were so great.  I can see how you would get full, too.  After thirty-odd years scouring the country for great new bands, like JC has, there must come a point where you’re just full up.  There is a limit to the amount of music we can really find special, because if there was more of it then it would by definition be less special, but I really don’t buy the argument that bands then were better than they are now.

And as Mrs. Toad is whispering in my ear, great bands tend to be born into times of economic hardship – it’s what makes the release all the more euphoric – so you never know, we could be on the cusp of great things over the next five years or so.

The Smiths – How Soon is Now?
Blur – Clover Over Dover
The White Stripes – Seven Nation Army
Arcade Fire – Intervention