When asked about these services I said “As far as I am concerned, last.fm and Pandora are fucking pointless.” It’s needlessly provocatively-phrased, I suppose, but not far from the truth when it comes to my own personal opinion.  But of course, that’s the pull-quote everyone seems to have taken from the panel, and it appeared in Wired as well as last.fm’s own blog, where they have a few digs back at me.

Now, to be absolutely fair, if last.fm had called labels, music blogs or podcasts ‘fucking pointless’ then I imagine I’d be bristling with indignation myself, so I can understand them being a bit irritated, but there are a couple of misconceptions as to what I was actually trying to say that I reckon I should try and clear up.

Firstly, I was not trying to express a general truth, more a personal opinion.  I am well aware that this kind of service is doing very, very well, and that plenty of people find a lot in last.fm and Pandora to love.  I also agree with some of the points made by last.fm about the market share that they are capturing, although funnily enough the last time I worked in an office we tried using last.fm as a radio station for a while and it didn’t prove very popular.  Nevertheless, I can easily see how it would suit office environments perfectly.

Also, if you aren’t relentlessly wading through a tidal wave of new music as I am, I can also easily see how saying ‘I like The National and Smog’ and then being recommended, say, Kurt Vile, would be a very welcome introduction.  As they point out as well, last.fm introduces people to a significant amount of music from ‘the long tail’, so they are also helping people discover relatively unknown bands, who they might not necessarily happen across otherwise.  This is all good.  I applaud this, and I genuinely think the service they provide makes a lot of sense, and I think it is a/ a very good thing, and b/ something a lot of people would be into (as they clearly are).

The core point I was trying to make, however, beyond attention-grabbing soundbites, was somewhat lost in misquotation.  What I have been quoted as saying is that whenever I have used last.fm it has played me twenty things I already know, and this is not quite right.  What I actually said was that whenever I use last.fm it plays me twenty things I already know I like, which may not seem that different, but is.

Twenty things I already know, would be a bunch of bands or songs I had already heard, or at least heard of, which is not what last.fm does and not what I was trying to say.  Twenty things I already know I like, on the other hand, can include plenty of bands and songs I have never heard of.  The criticism is not that they just play me back my own music collection, it is that they play me stuff which is, if anything, too appropriate to my taste.

The nature of digital music means that I and a lot of people like me have an incredible amount of music in our iTunes (or whatever library), so the service provided by last.fm is – for me at least, I recognise that this will be different for a lot of people – is actually bettered by sticking my own music library on random, not least because it is far more likely to jump from Ella Fitzgerald to The Dead Kennedys to Jackson C. Frank to The Pet Shop Boys to Slowcoaches to Barna Howard and on to Lower Dens, than anything I have seen on last.fm. And that’s important, because what makes your music taste interesting and characteristic is often not the stuff you listen to all the time, but more often than not the stuff you listen to only occasionally (and of course the blend of the two).

So when I listen to a new music discovery platform, whatever it is, I don’t want it to extrapolate from my favourite music and play me a pile of stuff which is roughly related and therefore almost certainly in the right ballpark.  Or, put simply, I don’t want to listen to too much stuff I am very likely to enjoy, I want to listen to some stuff it would probably not make sense to suggest to someone like me, because that’s how you learn and expand your horizons.

This applies to more than music, too.  If you and I use Google News to look up, say, the Sudan conflict we may well get very different results.  I will get a lot of ‘angry liberal’ sources, whereas depending on what websites you use, you might get the Daily Mail and Fox News*.  Google is now, depending on where you already get a lot of your news, tailoring your search results to give you stuff which basically reinforces your existing biases.  Now, I can see the attraction in that, but disappearing into these self-reinforcing bubbles is not good for understanding, nor for learning.  In fact, I would actually go as far as to say that in a broad sense it is downright bad for society as a whole.  Learning how other people think and being forced to face opinions other than your own is a crucial part of being a functioning human being, and it is how we still manage to function when crammed together in the kind of numbers you see on the planet at the moment.

Now, music is leisure, not politics, so it is of course far less important to broaden your mind if you can’t be bothered, but I don’t want to just be played an endless stream of stuff similar to what I have already found for myself.  Now, as was said on the panel, a lot of people simply do not want to be thrown constant curve-balls by a radio DJ.  And somewhat hypocritically having said all this, I myself found John Peel tended to be a bit too eclectic for me, actually, so however much I respect him I rarely listened to his show. But in general, for me personally, I want to be more surprised – more challenged – than I am by the music being played on most of these hyper-tailored services.

What I try and do on my own podcasts is court massive digressions, such as ‘Oh fuck it, I’m in Canada this week, let’s pepper the show with forgotten Canadian songs from the mid-nineties’.  Of course this may not please everyone, but I think people’s music tastes are more unpredictable at the margins than they are given credit for, and yet this is nothing I have seen an algorithm capture properly, because for all it’s unpredictable, it’s never entirely random.  Your age, your parents, your friends, your personal history… all of these things provide unique strands which hold together pieces of music which wouldn’t really make collective sense without them.  So when people put together playlists, as long as you find the right people, I tend to find a happier blend of surprises and familiarity than Pandora or last.fm or even their precursor, the Amazon recommendations, have ever given me.

Although, of course, I don’t know all about last.fm, and they have some very interesting features, such as Discover, and their ability to provide a localised gig listing service based on your music tastes is absolutely brilliant.  They have a Spotify app now too apparently, and I can’t think of anything better to guide you through Spotify’s featureless wasteland of unlimited availability than something like last.fm, which at least knows where to start, so please don’t think I think last.fm is shit, because I certainly do not.

I can absolutely see why people like last.fm so much.  And actually, I really like it in theory myself, it’s just that in practise I have always somehow failed to really click with it as a new music radio station, somehow.  If I want to listen to stuff I know I am going to like, then I am better off with my own music collection, and if I am looking to be introduced to something new, I want something more surprising than these services tend to give me.

*Although I deeply, profoundly hope not.

The Canadians win at music. We went to three things at the Canadian showcase: Hooded Fang (above), Slow Down Molasses, and Hot Panda, and all three were fucking great.  I know it’s a cliché to say that Canadians seem to be disproportionately good at music, but on this weekend’s evidence, they just are.  Born Gold to follow later tonight!

Brighton is an odd place. Seemingly designed around the car, with weird, three-lane roads running right through the middle of town and along the waterfront, and with the place centred on a series of huge roundabouts.  Inbetween all these incongruously large roads (particularly for a relatively small town), however, are rabbit warrens of tiny streets.  So you get used to ambling lazily around, and then IMMINENT DEATH, IMMINENT DEATH!

People are really, really nice.  I keep expecting to meet these music industry twats you hear so much about, and I still haven’t found them.  I know at our level of things you aren’t likely to meet a lot of industry twats, because they’re all chasing the money farther up the ladder, but this is a really big festival and everyone has been incredible.

Doing a seminar after three or four pints is a bad idea. I was on a panel about running independent labels, and I’d had a few pints.  So needless to say I talked way, way too much, swore like an angry sailor and contradicted everyone.  The one the next day about podcasts and alternative broadcasting was done stone-cold sober (well, it was at 11:30 in the morning) and was far more lucid and less annoying.

Buzz is an unpredictable beast. Fear of Men are pretty fucking buzzy band, to the best of my knowledge, but their set at the Amazing Radio thing was woefully under-attended. They were really good too, as were PINS, who played after them.  PINS are pretty damn buzzy themselves for such a new band (12,000 Soundcloud plays on one song), and while it was marginally busier for them, I was still surprised at the relatively modest turnout.  Mind you, I suppose the Amazing Radio showcase, whilst it had pretty much the best lineup of the whole festival, wasn’t listed in the official brochure, so maybe folk just didn’t know.

Jellied Eels are a fucking abomination. They just are.  Never eat them.  Ever.

I can be a right tedious cunt when drunk. I met loads of people at the end of the day yesterday, after a whole day of drinking.  Bad idea. Apologies are almost certainly due to Dani from Amazing Radio, Jake from Basement Fever, Matthew from the Pigeon Post, the drummer from PINS, most of Fear of Men, and that random guy who I thought was trying to start a fight with me, until he pointed out that it was actually me who had started it.

New music festivals are way, way better than music festivals. If The Great Escape ever gets big enough that they feel obliged to import shit headline bands to draw in the masses, then it will be a real shame.  Alright, they did have Gaz Coombes, Maximo Park, Mystery Jets and We Are Scientists on the bill, which was pretty fucking mystifying, but for the most part, these are all new and under the radar bands, and that made the whole thing far more fun.  Have you seen the lineup for Reading and Leeds this year?  Exactly.

Some of the venues are great, but some are atrocious. The Canadian stuff was help in the Blind Tiger, which was a great place.  Amazing Radio, on the other hand, had to make do with downstairs at the Queen’s Hotel, which was just weird, having all these bands play on conference centre carpet.  All we needed was a plate of little triangular sandwiches and a variety of biscuits and the oddness would have been complete.

I want to live somewhere with a beach.  And pubs. Pubs on the beach. The sun came out on Friday, and we had beer and grilled sardines on the beach. It. Was. Awesome.

People have sort of heard of Song, by Toad. Which is nice.  We met loads of ‘industry people’ who it seemed had actually heard of us, were aware of what we are doing, and seemed to like it.  This was a bit of a surprise, to be honest.

Be careful when crossing the road.  I think the people of Brighton actively try and run folk over.

Three days is about the limit. At SXSW this year, I hit it so hard during Interactive that I couldn’t really face seeing much during the music festival.  This is a colossal waste of time and money, so I am glad I managed to get out to see so much this time.  Credit must go to Ian as well, who rather bafflingly chose to get up incredibly early every day, and phoned to hassle me before noon and force me to come out to see things.

I was serious about the jellied eels.  Honestly, just don’t.  Horrendous things.

I struggle enough to put on gigs in a venue with a PA, a professional sound engineer and a bartender, so I am nothing short of in awe of the kind of madness it would take to put on a whole festival.  That’s just what my pal Baz has done though.  Most of the time he puts on gigs in Wigan (and I complain about Edinburgh being a tough sell!) but last Summer he started The Imploding Inevitable Festival up in the Lake District.

The Lake District is one of the most beautiful parts of the UK, in my opinion, and I used to go up there quite a lot when I was living in Manchester.  I didn’t go last year, but I will be there in June this time around because I am DJing at the festival this year.  Don’t worry though, Toad heroes Jonnie Common, The Pictish Trail and Rob St. John will all be playing too, so you won’t just be stuck up a mountain with just me, my record collection and no way to escape.

The Imploding Inevitable also chimes nicely with my new policy of boycotting the tedious identikit festivals you tend to find once the attendance goes much into the thousands.  I just prefer these smaller ones, frankly.  And you can buy tickets here if you so choose, and so choose you bloody well should.

It’s been an amazingly busy year so far, and recently I have had so much stuff going on even on the weekends – be it gigs, recording, trips to various events and so on, that even sticking to the podcast schedule has been an enormous challenge.

It’s odd to think that a lot of the things I am doing for the blog seem to get in the way of me actually writing it, but that is the case at the moment. Going down to The Great Escape this week, for example, is mostly blog-related in that I’m on a panel about new broadcasting models and podcasts, and another about running DIY record labels, but it is likely to play havoc with the posting on the site.

Also, blogging is itself changing as well.  A lot of the music chatter I find myself engaged in is finding an outlet on my Tumblr site and through Twitter as well, so suddenly my insistence that the entire internet agree with me about music is being spread across those two forms of social media, as well as Facebook, this site, the record label and the now-regular gigs we host.  And I don’t even make Spotify playlists yet, or use This is My Jam.  It means Song, by Toad is certainly changing, but I am buggered if I know what it is turning into.

I suppose it will always be little more than a slightly different incarnation of the same thing: me going on and on and on about music I like, so no real change, if you look at it sensibly.  But the new formats and new channels are kind of fascinating, in that very twenty-first century way: it’s obvious that things are changing, but not particularly obvious how.

The same bloggers who once had journalists cursing at the general public’s lack of appetite for thoughtful, intelligent writing, are now making the very same complaints themselves, as short-form, quickfire media like Tumblr and Twitter become more prominent.  I am not sure how much I agree with them, though. I mean, we all have our natural formats in which we are the most comfortable communicating, but a good writer should be a good writer, be it over ten paragraphs or 140 characters. I certainly find a lot of merit in all these new formats, but I am not always entirely certain what content I think belongs on the Tumblr site, say, instead of this one.

The reason I am going on about this at such length is partly because there is bugger all happening in Edinburgh this week, as far as I can see, in terms of live music, so I started a post and then found I had nothing to put in it.  And also, as I mentioned, I am about to start redesigning the site, to make sure the gigs are better represented, to make sure the label is more prominent, and to better integrate Twitter and Tumblr.

It’s a bit of a tricky task this time around.  The last time we redesigned the site was about three years ago or so, and back then it was simple: blog + label.  Now there is so much more going on, and frankly I am not sure where I should best be placing the emphasis.  It’s interesting though.  So yes, just warning you.  You might see some more changes around here soon.  I’ve absolutely no fucking idea what kind of changes, but definitely changes!

PR is, I think it’s fair to say, just about the closest you get at this level of the music industry to the grasping of nettles.

It’s something you have to do, you have to do it well, and it is almost impossible to get right.  I have the misfortune of having to, erm, grasp this nettle at both ends as well, because not only am I subject to a flood of PR emails and press releases from people wanting coverage on the blog, but of course I also have to write all the stuff we send out for Song, by Toad Records as well.

I don’t really know where to start on this one, because it was receiving all the promo emails for the blog which pretty much provided the grounding for me to write my own for Song, by Toad Records when the time came, and yet I am meaner about PR people than pretty much anyone else in the music industry.

There’s a simple reason for this of course, and that is that a worryingly large percentage of them seem to be complete fucking idiots.

For example, when I first started getting promo emails from Sony they were so threatening about what I could and couldn’t do with the music they were sending me that I was actually too scared to even download it in the first place.

Then there are those emails which include reams and reams of text, but no discernible link to actual music, or even a band’s website, anywhere. Or they are so heavily formatted that they’re barely decipherable. Or they speak to me in breathless, infantile over-excited PR-talk.  I assume these are more often than not written by a jaded forty-something trying really hard to sound like a giddy youngster, but I suppose it could just be a fucking imbecile instead.

Then there are those which are badly written.  And by that I don’t mean simply clumsily phrased, although that can be annoying enough, particularly when it is clumsily phrased hyperbole.  No, I mean simple literacy issues, like their and they’re, greengrocers’ apostrophes, and cod-yoof language butchery.

Even something as apparently trivial as the text accompanying this video gets on my nerves. ” The drive is mostly highway, fairly droll until you start actually ascending the hills themselves”.  Droll means funny.  How the fuck is driving along a motorway supposed to be in any way amusing?

After a few years being on the receiving end of this relentless shower of shite you get to know what kind of language leads to what kind of music, and you become even more narrow-minded than you were before.  If you think something is ‘sick’, I will not bother clicking on your link. Even describing something as ‘infectious’ tends to lead to awful music. I actually liked Silent Alarm an awful lot, but anyone who gets compared to Bloc Party is guaranteed to be shit. Bands with amusing names tend to be shit.  Even bands with playful names are usually shit. From Hackney?  You’re shit.  Shoreditch? Shit.  Hoxton?  Really fucking shit. Electro-indie? Shit. Soul-folk? Shit.  Indie-dance? Shit.  Powerpop? Shit. Anthemic, pounding, funky? All shit. And the list goes on and on and on.

Then there’s the band name giveaways.  Use a Z where there should be an S?  Then you’re fucking shit.  There is an exception of course, in that Dolfinz are excellent.  And Zed Penguin and eagleowl are two shining exceptions to the rules that all Penguin/Mouse/Owl bands are fucking awful. Stupid typography?  You’re shit, like !!! and Stellastarr* and every single witch house band on the fucking planet.

And please don’t compare your bands to the legends.  All that goes through everyone’s head after reading “Like a mix of early Jesus and Mary Chain and Fugazi…” is “…except considerably more shit.”  So don’t draw lofty parallels and don’t do ambitious covers either, it just makes your band look amateurish by comparison.  An ambitious cover more or less says that firstly, the band is trying to appropriate someone else’s good reputation by trying too hard to associate themselves, and secondly, ‘this is what our band might sound like, if we could actually write a decent song’.  Establish yourself first on your own merits first.

The ones which might actually piss me off more than anything else are those which employ utterly insincere compliments. “I love your blog, man.  You’ve introduced me to loads of rad new music.” Sometimes they add a glistening cherry to the top of this steaming pile of manure in the form of the following clincher: “Thanks for introducing me to [some band I wrote about four posts ago], they’re awesome.”

I don’t quite know what irritates me so much about the fake compliments, but I find it kind of insulting.  Do they really think I am so vain and insecure that they need to pretend to read my website all the fucking time, and that if they can convince me that they do, then I’ll be so overcome with gratitude and validation that I will write paragraph after paragraph of glittering prose about the wonderful merits of the glorious music they sent me?

Stop kissing my arse you fanny, you’re insulting me and you’re making a fucking fool out of yourself in the process.  When people actually do read the site on a regular basis it is pretty obvious, and this ‘hey man, really dig your blog’ shite is fooling no-one. We all know you’re just spamming the whole fucking internet with this crap, and there’s no fucking shame in that, it’s your job, no need to be so embarrassed about it.

But, after all this, what finally prompted me to snap and starting naming and shaming really, really bad PR emails on my Tumblr site Mini Toad wasn’t anything to do with the reasons above.  Let’s face it, we all make typos and spelling mistakes, and if we think a word means something it doesn’t then we’re rarely aware of that I guess.  And I suppose that I do like what can loosely be termed as ‘indie’ music, in that I listen to a lot of guitar-based pop, so people sending me ‘pounding, anthemic indie rock’, for all I hate it, aren’t exactly barking up the wrong tree altogether.

So many of these complaints I have made here are simply my own personal peccadilloes, and it is completely unreasonable to expect a PR person to know about them or even, really, to care about them.  As I will freely admit in Part 2 – Outgoing PR, doing PR is pretty much impossible to get entirely right, and people can be real dicks to you about it – as I have just been for the last five paragraphs.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of people out there doing the job who just plain don’t fucking get it at all.  No PR person is going to send you stuff that is to your taste all the time, just the same as no-one reading this blog ever agrees with every last band I post about.  And of course blogs flicker in and out of existence all the time, and their taste changes as the people writing them change, so I can imagine me and PR companies drifting apart over the years.

What I can’t understand is people who add me to mailing lists for shit there was never even the slightest chance I would like in the first place. Who the fuck bothers doing this?  If you are publicising house or trance or dubstep or soul or reggae, when you come across Song, by Toad do you really think ‘This is the kind of place that might like our music.  This will be a worthwhile use of my time.’

Here’s a tip: if you think I write about shit music, don’t fucking bother sending me yours.  We clearly don’t agree on this stuff, it’s a fucking waste of my time, your time and your band’s money.  I’ve had an increasing number of rappers send me promo emails recently. Fucking why? What the cock and balls were they thinking?  They must think my taste in music is dreadful, what the fuck do they think they’re going to do, inspire some glorious hip-hop epiphany?

I mean, going back to the PR Fails on the Tumblr site, who the fuck sent me this?  And why? They cannot possibly have looked at my fucking site and thought ‘he might like this’, so presumably they just didn’t think at all. Fortunately, Google Mail allows the following: filter messages like these -> from this sender -> mark as read – > delete.

And the worst thing is that having been bombarded with this crap every single day since 2004 I have turned into a sniping, bitter entitled twat of a blogger.  Just the kind that I would imagine PR people hate fucking dealing with, actually.  If you think I’m being a whinging little bitch, I can only imagine what PR people have to say about bloggers like me when they get together down the pub.

But the flipside is this: if PR is generally done so badly that it inspires this level of bleating, I can barely express how grateful I am to deal with the good ones.  And there are a lot of them, but because they don’t send me that many emails, they tend to be horrendously outnumbered in my inbox.  But people like Banter Media, Stay Loose, Create Spark, Goldest Egg, and the in-house stuff from Beggar’s Group, Fat Cat and One Little Indian, Chemikal and plenty  of others are really nice to deal with.

They send short, simple, hyperbole-free emails, with appropriate music, they trust me to read them without being pestered, and the link to the content in question is nice and clear.  They respond quickly and helpfully if I ever ask them any questions, and in general they make the whole thing seem so easy I find the crap emails I get all through the rest of the day even more baffling.

This is a continuation of this thread from Wednesday at Wide Days, to update with a little information about the A&R seminar, which I couldn’t very well write about at the time, because I was on it, talking shite in my usual way.

Modern A&R – How is talent developed and nurtured?

Alex Knight – Fatcat, Ellie Giles – Jigsaw Management, Pip Newby – Friends vs Records/PIAS, Stewart Henderson – Chemikal Underground Records, Matthew Young – Song, by Toad Records.

I will be writing about this a little differently from the ‘one thing after another’ way I rattled off the previous sessions on Wednesday, for obvious enough reasons, but there are still some good points which I think might be interesting to pass on.

Roughly speaking, I think it’s fair to say that A&R has probably not changed all that much at indie level.  Both Stewart and Alex confirmed that they are given a healthy cushion by their back-catalogues, and that allows them to sign who they want to sign, with little concern for the commercial potential or nous of the band.

Alex said that the main driver for Fatcat was to find something which sounded either different from anything anyone else was doing, or was just tremendous fun, and Stewart said that Chemikal, although they had chased hits around the turn of the millennium, had pretty much given up on that altogether now.

From my own perspective I found their chat interesting because we are a little different.  We actually are not insulated by a healthy back catalogue, and for a while we operated on the level that a lot of small indies do: they are run by amateurs and have no profit-making prerogative and therefore can basically release what-the-fuck-ever they want.  For us that’s changed a little now, in the sense that some releases have gone well and others not so well, but from now on we will pretty much use three rules to determine if we want to work with a band or not:

1. Do we love the music?  This is still the best commercial strategy I can think of.  If I start second-guessing myself on the basis of which band will and will not sell a lot of records, then I will start making stupid decisions and could well end up releasing music I am not that keen on, with no real sense that I would be very good at ‘picking hits’ in the first place.  So we’ll stick with having to love it ourselves, and assume that our taste is mainstream enough that in general we will find enough people to agree with us.

2. Do we like and trust the band personally.  This one is down to the fact that most of our bands end up crashing at our house at some point, or coming round for dinner or getting pished in the back garden when the sun’s out and, frankly, I don’t want to do this kind of stuff with people I don’t like.  And also, this industry means a lot of work for very little reward, and frankly I am happy to do that if I like the person I am doing it for and want to do my best for them, but it becomes very hard indeed if they are cocky wankers or ungrateful cunts.

3. Are they going to match the work we put in with effort and care of their own? I have been out of profitable work for nearly two years now, and it is getting to the stage now where I have to justify that decision, at least a bit.  We don’t need to make much money, per se, but a couple more projects which are in the black, even if only marginally, would be good.  And, if a band aren’t selling any records, which is absolutely fine by us, then they need to at least match the level of intensity and effort I will put in, otherwise I will slowly but surely begin to feel like a bit of a schmuck.  Which isn’t nice.

Anyhow, Toad Manifesto aside, Pip and Ellie approached matters from more of a major label standpoint.  Apparently major labels are backing off a little from plucking unknown bands out of nowhere, and I suppose the two most eminently mockable examples of that in Scotland recently are the likes of Make Model and Kassidy who ended up with massive advances thrown at them before they really even had an audience – and look where that got everyone involved.

I know it’s easy to point and laugh in these situations, but really the labels themselves should have know better: why were they signing bands without a fanbase to speak of or even any real songs?  More recently we seem to be seeing situations where bands are allowed to prove themselves at the indie  level (even if those indies are wholly or partly owned by, or in some cases funded by, the majors. Then, once they’ve demonstrated that they can sell records and fill venues, they get snapped up by a major who can throw some financial heft behind them and help them make a bigger breakthrough.

Where the majors do still have confidence, however, is with pop acts.  I know all of this is basically pop music, but you know what I mean: a great vocalist with some good lines or a couple of lads who make good hooks but can’t really sing tend to be picked up by managers or major label A&Rs (and apparently the majors now deal with managers far more than bands these days) who put them together with the right producer, maybe a good vocalist or whatever it is they happen to be missing and then get them to ‘write a hit’.

This happens a lot, even with the bands that get to that stage, and it’s fair enough, I think.  The kind of sums being invested at that level really do mean that you have a commercial obligation, and I think it would be ridiculous to claim that it should be ‘all about the art’ when this much money is involved.  If you want it to be all about the art, then you have to accept that such sums can’t really be justifiably risked.

Finally, I think there were a few general points to be made which apply across the board. In general everyone on the panel said that the most important thing was to find someone you trust.  Again, there are no guarantees in this business, and you really need to make sure that rather than just being flattered that any old label or manager or A&R has taken an interest.

I added this little caveat as well: make sure you have a really good idea of what kind of a band you are, and who it would and wouldn’t be appropriate for you to be working with. A major label kiddie-pop hit factory is not going to be much use to anyone reading this blog, but still if Sony got in touch, most bands would bite their hand off, and that can be suicidal.  Alternatively, there are bands with bigger ambitions who would be totally unsuitable for smaller labels who simply don’t have the resources to get them where they want or need to be.

So be careful, and make sure you know who you are as a band, you’re working with someone appropriate, and that you genuinely, sincerely trust them.

And that, I think, was just about that.  Then we all got very, very drunk.

Afternoon troops, seeing as I am at the Wide Days conference (come along if you’re in Edinburgh, it’s worth it, I promise) it is going to be pretty much impossible to write about music today, so I thought I would talk about some of the sessions going on and you can… umm… well, do as you please with it.  This is the internets after all.

2pm – Building and Analysing an Audience

with: Jim Madsley, The Generator – Anny Deery, Deery Me – Scott Cohen, The Orchard – Ben Sutherland, Chasing Owls (band).

14:18 – Ben: Be a little careful about saturating your hometown audience.  If you can fill venues in your hometown, don’t work with a local promoter unless you really think they can do something extra for you.

 14:20 – Scott: A gig isn’t just 40 mins on stage, it’s more about everything around it.  You need to interact with your audience, get emails addresses. Actively seek email addresses – make people either sign up or say no thanks.  And reward loyal fans, get them backstage, not matter how small the band this is still exciting for normal people.  Be at your own merch table and hang out with people.  It’s almost as important as playing a good gig.

14:22 – Ben: If you don’t have time, get a friend to help you out with merch, but best is to do the merch yourself and talk to the fans rather than disappearing to the green room and polishing off the rider.  We used to do flash gigs by going to a good pub nearby and playing a really quick unplugged set.

14:25 – Jim: Rope in 20 key fans who can act as advocates and spread the word for you on Facebook and Twitter and then reward them.  [Toad heckle: be really fucking careful how you do this, because if it doesn't come across as sincere people will think you're tossers.]

14:27 – Anny: There are ways of rewarding people for helping spread the word, like offering free downloads and free VIP treatment and so on. [Toad heckle: for the love of God please do not use 'tweet for a track' or something like that, because they're awful, so be careful how you implement this.]

14:29 – Scott: With YouTube make sure you don’t just upload and leave stuff there.  Use the info box to update with relevant information, current tour dates, purchase links and all sorts. Engage with people in the comments.

14:31 – Anny: Make sure you cross-link between all your various profiles.  Also, try and reward people for subscribing or signing up to mailing lists.

 14:35 – Scott: It’s about momentum.  You don’t sign for Man United just because you love football, and you don’t go from your basement to selling millions of records.  If you can’t fill a pub with fifty people, then you’re not ready for the next step which is a hundred people, or one hundred and fifty.  If you’ve been doing the same thing for a year and not making progress, then something is wrong.  Either you’re not good enough or you’re trying to appeal to the wrong people, but basically something is wrong. [Toad heckle: This is true to an extent.  Yes it maybe means you are doing things wrong, but you might just make obscure music.  That shouldn't make it less fun, or mean you worry any less about the people who do like it - balls to people who aren't into it, don't worry too much about them.]

14:36 – Ben: Remember your audience is hungry and will welcome anything you can put out there.  Perfectly packaged stuff is fine, but it’s expensive, and the perfect recording is lovely, but your audience probably won’t mind a decent recording. Don’t worry too much, you need to constantly feed the beast – give people something to be interested in.

14:39 – Scott: You can do really easy webcam sessions, and people might even like them better than the posh videos, and they cost you nothing to do. [Toad heckle: people fucking loved these Meursault van sessions, and they were the easiest things in the world to do:]

14:40 – Jim: Is it worth getting management, PR, pluggers and so on around you?

14:42 – Scott: Yes, but that doesn’t mean you work less, it means you work more.  I don’t know one lazy person who has made anything of themselves. You may not do the same things as before, but you’ll be doing more work.

14:43 – Ben: Remember that you’re the boss, though.  You have to absolutely trust them if you bring these people on board. Don’t be afraid to bring other bands together and ask if the people you’re considering working with are good or bad – if they’re worth working with someone will have worked with them before and can offer you some help.

14:44 – Jim: How about festivals?

14:45 – Scott: They are good to get, but they are tough gigs.  You have to have your shit together, you get no soundcheck, and the people are not your audience and might not care at all.  Sometimes I see young bands who get their break and they just aren’t ready for it.

14:46 – Ben: Yeah, but you should take it if you get offered a festival, because it’s not what you’ve done before, and you’re playing to a totally different audience and it’s a real opportunity. [Toad heckle: I'm with Scott on this one, festivals can be a fucking nightmare.  They are great big social events, mostly, and the music is there as wallpaper as often as not.  So they can be great to play, and I've seen some of our bands have a great time at festivals, but a lot of them have been fucking awful.]

 14:47 – Audience question: What is the best way to do in-festival promotion, so people who are there know that you’re even playing at all? We flyered and gave out free t-shirts because we were up against the Strokes!

 14:49 – Panel answers: mostly they answered a different question and talked about trying to get on festival bills, and about how the bookers book the trendy bands with no audience and the major headliners first, and then book the middle of the bill last.  Research your festivals before even getting in touch and find out who’s booking them. [Toad heckle: I think Sparrow and the Workshop made up clothes pegs with the time of their set on it, and went around the End of the Road Festival surreptitiously pegging them to people.  That was genius!  Mind you, they also got temporary tattoos printed up too - clever fuckers!]

14:53 – Scott: The major takeaway [Toad heckle:BING! Buzzword bingo!] is that there used to be a set way of doing this and there were winners and losers.  Now there’s this giant collection of things and you can do them badly or do them well, but there is no set path anymore. [Toad heckle: if you're particularly uncomfortable with things like Facebook or Twitter or something like that then don't push it, because you'll come across as awkward and unnatural.  You should put the effort into something else though, and don't take it as and excuse to be lazy, but there's little benefit in doing something badly just because you feel obliged to do it.]

14:57 – Aaaannnd, coffee!  And some flyering for tonight’s gig.  Did I mention that already?  Here it is. Ker-SPAM!

3:15pm: Rise Above the Noise – How to Get Ahead in the Download Stores

Scott Cohen – The Orchard

Coming soon… I need a piss first though.

15:14: Scott admits he is going to re-tread some stuff from the previous panel.  Pint, anyone?

15:16: One amazing song, plus a great performance/recording and some good promotion and that genuinely was how you made it in the music industry.  But you needed all three, you needed to get on radio, you needed a great recording.  People would do whatever it took to get the song on the radio. [Toad heckle: Yes, hence payola and coke and whores.]

15:19: Instead of MTV or radio now it is all about collecting fans – monetise fans not content.

15:20: Now music industry uses ARPU – Average Revenue Per User.  [Toad heckle: Every other industry uses this apparently.  No wonder I hate the world. From now on Song, by Toad Records demands that you fuckers become more commercially productive, otherwise fuck the lot of you.]

15:22: From 1000 fans, you can make about £20k/year.  About 50% will pay you no more than a quid a year, but 2% of them will spend £150/year quite happily.  This is an average ARPU of £14.75, and 20% of the audience generate £72% of the revenue. [Toad heckle: do you feel dirty yet?  I do.]

15:24: Design bundles and packages for the various tranches of your audience.  If you reckon you have an audience of 1000 people, make twenty really nice box sets, but no more than that. Then make something for the people who only want to spend £1.

15:27: People who buy the AAA Bundles and the deluxe shit are often happier than the people who pay for the cheap stuff. [Toad heckle: this makes sense, even though it was expensive, people were really happy to buy the Japanese War Effort 10" we released, because it was gorgeous, it came with sweeties and the music was great - it was expensive, limited and worth the money.]

15:30: Reading recommendation: Scott Stratten – Unkmarketing Talks about social currency and how you can’t demand interaction and loyalty without giving something first.

15:31: Your fans’ Facebook and Twitter feeds are all about them.  They don’t post things to pimp your shit, they do it to express who they are.  So design what you’re giving them on this basis. [Toad heckle: this is hugely important, and a massive point which most people miss.]

15:35: Lady Gaga’s team, before the release, focused specifically on the gay community in New York.  They didn’t go straight to radio and built the community one person at a time.  [Toad heckle: Umm, I don't even know what to say about this, but eagleowl may wish to start taking notes...]

15:38: Ah right, whoops, the point was that even the major labels aren’t starting with massive radio and PR campaigns, they start with building the audience and taking it from there.  Sorry.

15:42: Facebook ad campaign (one Scott considers a success): 37m impressions, 4m people reached (most people saw it more than once), 34k clicks, 10k new page likes.  This is a cost of $0.42 per page like, and remember from before that the average fan is worth £14.75 a year. [Toad heckle: As a comparison we spend about £150-£200 sending out promo CDs of a new single to radio, and in return we get maybe three or four plays most of the time, but little more unless people really take to it.]

 15:50: Find out who open all your emails when you send stuff to your mailing list, and reward them for it by sending them early demos, extra bonus tracks, invitations to stuff.  But don’t do it as an inducement [Toad heckle: aaagh, tweet for a track again!] do it as a reward after the fact so that they know you’re grateful for their support. [Toad heckle: I used to (and should probably consider doing again) send the handful of people who bought most things we released on the label a handmade compilation CD of a few Toad Session, some new stuff we were doing the following year, a couple of b-sides and some stuff I just liked even if they weren't on the label.  I thought this was a nice touch.]

16:03: This talk was apparently more about building the audience, rather than how to stand out in the digital download stores, because no-one at these outlets cares about you unless you can demonstrate an audience.  Don’t waste their time unless you are ready, and make sure you have all these things ready to persuade them.

Right, I am going to have to pack in the liveblogging for the next panel as I am actually one it.  I will write a summary afterward instead.  One of the people on that list isn’t on the panel though, which is why I was asked to step in, but I am not sure which one.

Modern A&R – How is talent developed and nurtured?

Alex Knight – Fatcat, Ellie Giles – Jigsaw Management, Pip Newby – Friends vs Records/PIAS, Stewart Henderson – Chemikal Underground Records, Matthew Young – Song, by Toad Records.

Now moved to this post here…

Caring about music is nice, but it’s pretty easy.  We like stuff, we don’t like stuff, we grievously insult people with different opinions from ourselves… the usual tedious carping.

However, once a year we get the chance to do something a little bit more, and to actually make a bit of a contribution to the world: Mrs Toad organises the Stockbridge collection for the RNLI – the lifeboats for you acronymophobes – and on Saturday 28th April we will be asking you for a little help.

Every year we collect for the RNLI between 10am and 4pm here in Stockbridge and every year our friends and various music allies turn out to help us.  We are very grateful for the help, and once again this year we will be asking for it.  Usually the incentives we offer involve roast lamb and plenty of wine, but this year we can add another gentle inducement:

On the evening of the 28th April Edinburgh’s sonic alchemists The Leg will be launching their new album An Eagle to Saturn at a mystery venue in Edinburgh’s Old Town, and if you choose to be so nice as to help us collect for the lifeboats beforehand then Mrs. Toad and I will pay for your ticket to the album launch show.  As well as plying you with roast meat and wine.

So in other words, if you don’t turn up and help out, you must be a pretty dismal sort of fucker; shame on you. Tickets for The Leg album launch can be bought in person from me, from the band, or from Avalanche Records in the Grassmarket.

Needless to say, whatever ends up being on it, the longlist will be Wrong and will provide clear evidence of the biases towards something or other inherent in Scottish music, and the fact that my favourite album is not on it just goes to show how utterly corrupt these awards ceremonies are.

I mean, there will inevitably be lots of willfully obscure rubbish on there just to prove how eclectic and intellectual the judges tastes are, when the stuff I like most has sold way more records and achieved far more than those pretentious, hipster wank-bands ever have.

And having sold way more records will be the perfect demonstration of the self-evident superiority of my own suggestions, except in cases when I am talking about records which have sold more than my own choices.  Then the record sales argument automatically reverses and the inferior sales of my preferences becomes instantly indicative of the fact that I care way more about music than them and am not just a populist ignoramus.

And of course, this being Scotland, there will be the inevitable Central Belt/Glasgow/Byres Road bias fun to be had, primarily because not enough of my fucking friends will be nominated.  And really, the only possible excuse for that has to be bias, because there’s no way at all that my friends’ albums will be overlooked because everyone else thinks they’re shit, it will be because the idiots who make these decisions never stray away from the ABC and King Tut’s Hoo-Hah Hut. And inevitably that attitude will result in the fantastic Loanhead Ethiopian-dub-garage scene being overlooked*, which just goes to show how meaningless these awards really are.

Which brings me on to another grotesque unfairness that this will inevitably embody: the fucking in-crowds.  Everyone knows that the only people who get ahead in music are those with the most pals.  Now, you might suggest that because people only tend to go to music which they actually enjoy, then the bands they inevitably get to know the best are the ones they like the most, but that would make you a naive rube, because it’s obviously down to some shadowy clique of which I am not a member because I obviously have way too much integrity for that sort of thing. Besides, I like to tell it how it is, and these people just can’t handle that.

And of course if you don’t have all the right friends then of course you can always use money to rig it.  Even though this award doesn’t actually cost anything at all to enter we all know how this stuff works, of course.  Some shadowy and utterly ill-defined interrelation of mutually supportive commercial interests means that the empty-pocketed people – the ones with the real artistic integrity, the ones who are just doing it for the love of music, unlike those other shallow, careerist douchebags – can’t ever compete with the people who basically own this award and were always going to make sure they won anyway.

And now that we know the list is hopelessly biased, corrupt and shows exceptionally poor judgement, I think it’s time to sit back and see who actually gets nominated. And that’s in about nine days’ time, folks.  See you then.

*Warning, I may have stolen this joke from someone on Facebook.  I’m denying it, myself, but there have been allegations.  Strenuous allegations.

I used to live down there, as you probably also know, but only for about three or four years, and I moved up to Scotland about seven years ago now.  Nevertheless it’s amazing how much affection I still retain for London, and it was really nice to be back, even if just for a little while.

There’s an odd sort of anti-London sentiment in a lot of people in Edinburgh, particularly amongst white collar workers, which I always found a little pathetic when I first started coming up here to visit Mrs. Toad.  I guess a lot of people go down South, either don’t like it very much or don’t achieve what they wanted to achieve, and end up coming back feeling a little as if they have failed and end up resenting London for it.

Personally, I love Edinburgh, and I could well see why anyone would choose to live here over London, but the two places are so different I always found the competitive comparisons a little pointless. I definitely think you need a certain mentality to enjoy a place as crowded, as busy and as relentless as London, but I always found it pretty easy to ignore the hurly-burly and find my own peace and quiet even in such a crowded city.

By coincidence, one of the friends I was supposed to meet yesterday couldn’t make it, so I had four or five hours to myself, just wandering around on a gloriously sunny day and exploring some of my old haunts.

I used to get quite a lot of time to myself when I lived down there as well, because when Mrs. Toad and I were courting she lived up in Edinburgh, so we only saw one another every other weekend.  That meant that every second weekend I didn’t really have that much to do, and I would often walk along the South Bank, dodge the hordes around the wheel and the galleries, and just enjoy watching the river.

I lived on the Thames at the time, on a canal boat moored at Nine Elms Pier, so the river was a huge part of my relationship with the city.  Yesterday, with nothing much on, I wandered back down to the pier to see what had changed and watch the new residents pottering about on their boats the way we did when we lived there.

It was odd looking at the boat I used to own, and the rather drastic modifications which have been made since, as well as the Charles William, another boat I lived on for a bit, but with new owners eyeing me rather distrustfully as I stood up on the riverside walkway and just absorbed the sights of the pier and the river for a while.  Mrs. Toad and I built our relationship while I was living on that boat, and we already knew we were in it for keeps even at that early stage, so it was both strange and nice to see it again.

The pace of development around there was a bit shocking though, with both the New Covent Garden Market and the industrial estate the pier backed onto both being razed to the ground to make way for massive, ugly glass behemoths full of over-priced flats.

So after that I decided to wander along the river towards the Southbank Centre where I was meeting another pal later.  Along the way I stopped for an hour at one of the tapas places under the railway arches at Vauxhall – a place I love because of their bloody brilliant octopus in white wine, with paprika and rock salt.  Vauxhall is a funny place actually, with huge Portuguese and gay populations, as well as the MI5 building just by the bridge, which makes for an odd mix of people at the various cafes under the arches.

After that I completed my wander along the river at a leisurely pace.  A very leisurely pace. Particularly when I have time on my hands I must have just about the slowest amble of pretty much anyone I know, and that’s even more obvious on the South bank of the Thames around rush hour, with commuters barging along, tourists scuttling about, an infestation of joggers desperately trying to quash their self-loathing for a couple of hours, and cyclists all over the bloody place.

It can be fun to be the only person not in any kind of a hurry in the midst of busy people though; a sort of smug serenity can descend over you, which I kind of like.  Particularly when I am sat at my desk, I am so bombarded with emails and obligations that any amount of time wasted sitting out in the garden in the sun comes laced with guilt, but on this occasion I genuinely had no need to make excuses – I had hours to kill and no way to make them productive, so I was able to truly enjoy purposelessness for the first time in ages.

And that brings me onto the one thing I always enjoyed the most about London: it’s just so fucking big.  I have always lived in cities, so for all I enjoy the countryside a great deal, I am not someone who yearns to get away from the masses. In fact just the opposite: I tend to feel most comfortable with big, sprawling, messy city life.

The reason for this is related to how peaceful my day was yesterday: in cities that big no-one knows who you are, and no-one cares at all.  There’s an odd kind of privacy in that.  If anything makes me feel overwhelmed by modern life it is not all the shit happening everywhere, it’s the constant awareness of the needs and requirements of other people, and that constantly present sense of obligation in the back of your mind.

In London, however, where the antithesis of the Cheers theme song is true and nobody knows your name, I tend to find it easy enough to find isolation and peace, even amongst millions of people. And it is a wonderful treat, to be able to sit somewhere on a bench for an hour, watch the river go by and do not one single thing.  Nothing.  No phone shit because my battery was dying and I needed it to meet up with friends later, no checking emails, not even any sense of skiving because I couldn’t have done any work if I’d wanted to.  Just a few hours of peace, watching the sun go down over the Thames, and total and utter anonymity.

With that kind of peace and quiet your mind wanders, and I found myself remembering all the wonderful times Mrs. Toad and I had spent in the city, walking back along the river from Borough Market to cook food together, and perhaps even more lovely was this: I was reminded of the inbetween weekends, when we didn’t see each other, and I would often just walk along the banks of the river by myself and sit quietly, enjoying that incredible feeling you get when even a few dates into a relationship you know with absolute certainty that you have found the person you want to spend the rest of your life with.

Mrs. Toad was actually in American on business while I was down in London, and we may have been apart again, but it was actually quite a romantic couple of days.  In a slightly strange way.