A gentleman called Timothy London sent me through some interview questions the other day, basically giving me the opportunity to rant about how people who really want to be famous can just fuck off, which is something I am always only too happy to do.  The interview will be compiled with several other and published, I presume on his site, in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, there was a question he asked which led me to digress a little and start rambling about a familiar topic – why is the big shiny end of the music industry so fucked?  The question is below, as is my answer, as well as a little bit of extra stuff at the bottom.  Isn’t that crybaby cool?

- The music industry is looking for economic models for the future; latest figures show another large drop in album sales, particularly in the States, I can imagine a certain amount of panic in various boardrooms…  Can you see what you are doing being part of a ‘new’ industry, or, is it closer to the tradition of boutique labels various enthusiasts have set up over the years?

Personally, I think it’s both.  Alternative music (of all stripes – I include dance, modern jazz, you name it, in this bracket – anything unpalatable to the mainstream) only ever made a lot of money when it was providing fodder for the mass entertainment industry.

The guts have been ripped out of that kind of music now because things like X-Factor and Pop Idol have discovered how to deliver essentially the same product (kiddie pop, disco-lite and water cooler chat music) in a way which the bulk of the population seem to find far more compelling, so if you are just selling the music itself, you can no longer compete.

Consequently, all that we’re left with is an entertainment industry which is less interested in ‘just’ music, which is a very one-dimensional product compared to that kind of interactive, multi-media model, and has taken its huge audience with it.  So, with mainstream entertainment no longer as closely aligned, to a large extent the new music industry ‘is’ boutique labels, with a few people having the potential to make money by sniffing out the potential crossover acts.

But in general, do I see myself as beaing part of re-inventing the selling of music for a new century?  In some senses I do, in the way that the fans, the facilitators and the creators are all pulled together into one space – the blog, the gigs, etc.  This is something the incumbent music industry is going to have to learn to do very, very fast indeed.  But in general I’d say no, I am not looking to reinvent the wheel.  I am a small label, I want to remain small, in control of my own destiny, and with a manageable, sustainable level of commitment – pretty much the same as any small label throughout history.

So that was my answer, and as usual it ended up slightly off topic, but it led me onto this thought, which is that the music purely and simply is not enough anymore.  The tradtional music industry is floundering, while small labels and DIY enterprises thrive, and the celebrity industry (which the big labels used to have a major role in creating for us) is also, sadly, in the rudest of health.  Why is this?

Well, my opinion is that a very significant aspect is that both the stools ‘twixt which the music industry seems to be falling offer significantly more than just music – they are multi-dimensional, multi-media, interactive things, which is why they are successful.

Pop music in the form of Pop Idol and the X-Factor and so on offers more than just music to bond over, it offers television and web interaction and, most significantly, it offers both participation and big, messy soap opera to go with the music.  There is a big element of music which is less about the tunes themselves, and more about having something in common with our peers, giving us shared experiences and making us feel part of a group, and all these extra dimensions which the X-Factor and its diseased ilk provide mean that as pop music it offers so much more than Britney or Christina ever did.  Although Britney, soap opera… never mind.

Anyway, at the DIY end of the spectrum you have the same thing.  Fence Records may be resolutely analogue, they may shun digital distribution and talk about hating the internet, but they are still a very Twenty-First Century record label in the way they have, aided considerably by the forum on their site, built and cemented a community around the label itself.  It is a lot more than just music.

Ditto myself.  If our label just sold records and that was that, I don’t think we’d get very far, but we try and do a lot more, provide community, give people space to bicker and crack wise, and make people feel a part of it all.  We also try and give you as many ways as possible to get into Song, by Toad, be it live gigs, talking pish on the Five, podcasts, student radio, lots of video… basically, being multi-dimensional, multi.. all those things I said up there, basically.

We also, like the X-Factor, do not define our success entirely by the number of records we sell.  We want to grow, certainly, but last year readership on the site remained fairly static, for example.  Is this a bad thing?  Well in a sense, but the podcast listenership grew considerably, the sessions took a major step forward and we pretty much started a record label from scratch (our first release was not much more than a year ago, remember) so it would hard to argue that we didn’t move forward.

Technology caught the major labels napping, but it wasn’t just that they never caught up with what other people could suddenly do, but surely it’s at least as significant that they never exploited it to see what they themselves could do either.

Music companies still don’t like people discussing music, it seems, and Google are a very dangerous company to give control of your information because they cannot be trusted.

Google have recently been deleting, wholesale, entire music blogs, representing years of work for no profit by people who are in some cases explicity operating one hundred percent within the law, and in other cases with the tacit approval of the music companies whose nuisance complaints under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act have actually caused what tweeters are calling #musicblogocide2k10.

About six months ago, if you remember, the music companies started abusing the DMCA, using it in a frivolous, scattershot manner to harrass music blogs as a nuisance technique for disrupting independent music conversations.  Effectively, they would make copyright complaints to blogs hosted on Google’s Blogger service under the DMCA, which pretty much obliges Blogger to delete the post in question, irrespective of the legality of the post in question.

After the resulting outcry amongst bloggers (whose writing is their intellectual property, remember) Google backed off slightly, insisting that they would simply revert accused posts to draft rather than delete them, and that they would start notifying bloggers when they removed their posts rather than simply deleting them and hoping writers would never notice.  It still remained on record as a Terms of Service violation however, and now the inevitable has happened: some blogs with multiple complaints to their name have been dubbed repeat offenders and simply deleted.

Put that way it all sounds pretty tame, doesn’t it.  It’s pretty clear that mp3 blogs operate in something of a legal grey area – some of the tracks we post are shared with the blessing, and even encouragement, of the copyright holders, some with their tacit if unwritten approval, and some directly against their wishes.  Some offer downloads of full albums for free, and are completely illegal as well as being, as most bloggers would agree, very damaging to artists, labels and even bloggers themselves.  Why is it an issue, then, after a legal complaint about an illegal act and with a record of repeatedly flaunting the law, if a writer is simply shut down?  It’s not an issue, actually, for me, when put like that, but that is an almost totally inaccurate portrayal of the reality of the situation. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »