Hey record companies - since people aren't buying music much any more and radio stations play narrower and narrower playlists and video stations don't play videos, you might want to let little guys like me put your videos on my site to promote your bands.
This post replaces a video by a band that just might have sold a record or two.
Oh well, you lose, record company. Music will continue without you.
Showing posts with label music industry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music industry. Show all posts
March 4, 2012
February 5, 2012
Neil Young feels that "Piracy is the new radio"
At a recent conference, Neil Young addressed piracy in recent times, "It doesn't affect me because I look at the internet as the new radio. I look at the radio as gone. [...] Piracy is the new radio. That's how music gets around. [...] That's the radio. If you really want to hear it, let's make it available, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 percent of it."
He also suggested that fans can sample music through piracy or streaming services and then purchase the music they value.
Interesting point of view.
I think that lots of people sample music through a variety of means, including piracy. The issue as I see it is conversion. With taping a song off the radio or old cassette recording of a friend's record, I was motivated to buy the music mostly because I was getting a higher quality form of the music. With piracy, I can get a FLAC version of an album and have no incentive, outside of my desire to support the artist, to buy the music. Of course, Neil's got a beef with the quality of digital music to begin with and has since the first days of CDs.
I fully agree with Neil regarding radio being dead. I listen to a bit of satellite radio in the new car, but I'm not sure I'll pay for it once the free offer runs out, and I cannot stand traditional radio with it's ultra-narrow playlists and 50-50 ratio of music to commercials.
However, I often think this blog is a bit like a new form of radio. It's like I'm the deejay curating the show and saying, here's a new song from a band I like, or an old song that I think is cool, taking readers/listeners on a journey through what I want to present.
You can check out articles with Mr. Young's quotes here and here.
You can check out Crazy Horse's 37 minute jam on his web site.
And here's an absolute Neil classic - "Heart of Gold".
He also suggested that fans can sample music through piracy or streaming services and then purchase the music they value.
Interesting point of view.
I think that lots of people sample music through a variety of means, including piracy. The issue as I see it is conversion. With taping a song off the radio or old cassette recording of a friend's record, I was motivated to buy the music mostly because I was getting a higher quality form of the music. With piracy, I can get a FLAC version of an album and have no incentive, outside of my desire to support the artist, to buy the music. Of course, Neil's got a beef with the quality of digital music to begin with and has since the first days of CDs.
I fully agree with Neil regarding radio being dead. I listen to a bit of satellite radio in the new car, but I'm not sure I'll pay for it once the free offer runs out, and I cannot stand traditional radio with it's ultra-narrow playlists and 50-50 ratio of music to commercials.
However, I often think this blog is a bit like a new form of radio. It's like I'm the deejay curating the show and saying, here's a new song from a band I like, or an old song that I think is cool, taking readers/listeners on a journey through what I want to present.
You can check out articles with Mr. Young's quotes here and here.
You can check out Crazy Horse's 37 minute jam on his web site.
And here's an absolute Neil classic - "Heart of Gold".
November 6, 2011
Pete Townshend on the music industry
Pete Townshend recently gave a talk in which he touched on his opinions on the music industry. While I certainly don't agree with everything he said, it's well worth reading for anyone interested in the industry of the art that we love so much.
======================
Firstly I'm honoured to have been asked to do this first lecture in the name of John Peel. John and I were never close friends, and I know he was not always an unconditional Who fan, but through his long-time producer John Walters – who was a great friend to me and to Who drummer Keith Moon – I followed John Peel's career with the sense of a family insider. I don't want to kick off this series of annual lectures with any po-faced intellectualism. Nor do I want to talk about pop music as art (hard for me because music as art is my favourite subject). Neither do I wish to try to make this lecture amusing, or light-hearted or even ironic in the tradition of the sixties and post sixties pop era Peely and I shared. I don't want to try to celebrate John Peel, nor make this into any kind of memorial. That's all been done. So what do I want to do?
I have limited time. Looking at what John Peel did with his show on radio for many years is worth looking at. But I must assume that most listeners will know what he did. Annie Nightingale once told me that John was one of the few deejays at Radio 1 who would take home everything left in the in-tray cubbyholes at the end of each week. More than that, he listened to it all. Sometimes he played some records that no one else would ever have played, and that would never be played on radio again. But he listened, and he played a selection of records in the course of each week that his listeners knew (partly because the selection was sometimes so insane) proved he was genuinely engaged in his work as an almost unconditional conduit between creative musicians to the radio audience.
So he listened.
And he took chances with what he played.
And he is gone.
Why was John Peel's system important? Why is listening important? Why is being ready to give space to less polished music important? Will John Peelism survive the internet? Or is John Peelism thriving on the internet without many of us realising it?
So we have John Peel. The BBC. And – for the purposes of this lecture iTunes. All enormous icons in music.
Let me introduce you briefly to my inner artist, then I will put him back in his box.
I don't give a shit about making money. I think rock music is junk. I am a genius. The Who were OK but without me they would have all ended up working in the flower market, or worse - in Led Zeppelin. John Peel played some records that were so bad that I thought he was taking the piss sometimes. The BBC only gave us Pop Radio 1 in the 60s five years after the pirates had proved there was an audience for it. Sadly, unlike the pirates, they didn't accept payola.
I really should put this inner artist guy back in his box yes? Have we got our newspaper headlines yet?
This inner artist really doesn't give a shit about any of this lecture. Just give him a piano and a guitar and some decent way to record the music, a pleasant room to work in, and a few free hours, and he is happy. When he's done he hands me the end product and says – there, a work of genius, try and live off it for a while you philistine. It seems to me that a conversation between my inner artist with the late Steve Jobs would have been impossible. I seem to remember that once in an interview I let my artist out of the box for a minute too long and he said he wanted to cut Jobs's balls off. As I force my artist back in the box again, I hear him say that in fact he really likes his iPad and loves to noodle with GarageBand. My inner artist is a bit of an ageing Mod you see. He really thinks the late Steve Jobs was one of the coolest guys on the planet: loved his black outfits, cut his balls off, look at my red Vespa …etc. Irrational.
So there was pirate radio, then Radio 1, then a music shop. There were record companies and music publishers. Was it good, what the God of pop music had created?
Music publishing has always been a form of banking in many ways, but – in cooperation with record labels – active artists have always received from the music industry banking system more than banking. They've gotten…
1. editorial guidance
2. financial support
3. creative nurture
4. manufacturing
5. publishing
6. marketing
7. distribution
8. payment of royalties (the banking)
Today, if we look solely at iTunes, we see a publishing model that offers only the last two items as a guarantee, distribution and banking, with some marketing thrown in sometimes at the whim of the folks at Apple. It's a fantastic piece of software, I use it all the time and I was honoured once to meet the woman who wrote the software. But iTunes is not like radio.
Radio is less driven by cash flow, a little more driven by secondary income streams (like advertising, subscriptions or in the case of the BBC license fees), and thus needs its pop music to be cool, look hip, cover a wide array of bases and satisfy a broad market.
Let me quickly go over this list again. (do so). Now is there really any good reason why, just because iTunes exists in the wild west internet land of FaceBook and Twitter, it can't provide some aspect of these services to the artists whose work it bleeds like a digital vampire Northern Rock for its enormous commission?
Let's talk it through……
Item 1. Editorial guidance. A&R. Employ 20 A&R people from the dying record business. Have them respond to tracks sent in from new artists. If they feel the artists are bad, or aren't ready, say so. But have them tell the truth, kindly and constructively. Guide them to other helpful resources, don't just send them to the wolves of Blogland where it seems to me a lot of the vilest bile comes from people who could be drunk, or just nuts. A fledging musician at the start of a career is a delicate thing – even a rapper. (You'll just have to take my word for that.) (Apple do already have back-room people assessing what's hot, but they don't have this kind of power. I'll bet they'd love it. 20 John Peels inside Apple – imagine it).
Item 2. Financial support. Subsequently provide free computers with music software to 500 artists a year who the 20 A&R people feel merit it. Provide some basic training.
Item 3. Creative Nurture. Follow the work of these 500 artists very carefully. Help where you can. Keep out of the way if necessary.
Item 4. Manufacturing. (This should be called 'posting' today I suppose.) Provide a place on iTunes where these artists can share their music. It should be a like a local radio station. Yes Apple, give artists some streaming bandwidth. It will sting, but do it. You will get even more aluminum solid state LURVE for doing so.
Item 5. Publishing. Help artists protect their copyrights, don't just exploit the loopholes of Grand Theft. This is a minefield today. The internet is destroying copyright as we know it. So they will lose the battle, but guide them to hang on to what they can. Otherwise they might only ever make one album.
Item 6. Marketing. Select a number of the artists on the free shared space local radio station and sell their work on iTunes with some helpful advertising within the Apple software machine. Show that you get behind them.
Item 7. Distribution. Go further. License the best selling artists to other organisations (like record companies, bookshops and highstreet and Mall-based retailers for example) who are willing to make packages, goods you can hold in your hands and give for birthdays, Christmas and Diwali. Share revenue with Amazon. I'm not sure why that notion is so repellent to the Aluminums.
Item 8. Payment. Stop insisting on aggregators to deal with small artists (because you can't be bothered with the expense of accounting for the numerous small amounts of money you've collected on their behalf) and pay direct. Why should an artist pay even more commission to an aggregator merely to get paid? (For the uninformed, an aggregator in the iTunes world is a company who stand between the artist and iTunes and thus prevent Apple having to deal with artists directly. Some of these aggregators provide some of the resources I've pleaded for above, but they are really just another form of punitive banking).
So what does my inner artist think of all that? Doesn't he give a shit? I can tell you now, he thinks all that sounds really amazing. He wants to cry. If Apple do even one of the things on my wish-list he will offer to cut off his own balls (they've only ever been a distraction after all). Etc.
What creative people want is to know their music has been heard. They would prefer a response that was constructive than a positive or negative review. They would prefer expertise to opinion. They would like to know the public if they had a chance to hear the music, also had a chance to make up their own minds. They would prefer that in the long term the public were willing to pay for their music. But looking at the John Peel model what is clear is that just knowing there was a chance the great man would listen, react and offer the music on air, for whatever reason, was enough for budding musicians and bands.
That is where we must be going. Musicians need to be heard, to be judged, if possible to be paid, but also allowed to believe they had more than a single chance to get a hit. Software systems that offer this model will survive and prevail – loved and embraced by musicians of every sort – whatever happens financially.
Whether the public listen or not, creative writers and musicians should get paid if their work generates money by virtue of its mere existence on radio, television, YouTube, Facebook or SoundCloud. It's tricky to argue for the innate value of copyright from a position of good fortune (as I do). I once suggested on a forum that people who download my music without paying for it may as well come and steal my son's bike while they're at it. One woman was so incensed that she tried to argue that she was still supporting me as an artist by 'sharing' (my parentheses) music with others who would eventually filter down some cash in some form or other to me, that would pay for my son's bike – and she was not, in any sense, a thief or a criminal. I think she was in a kind of denial. Cutting the body to fit the cloth rather than the correct way around.
We now live in a digital world in which the only absolute is work by the hour. Lawyers, accountants, doctors, nurses, plumbers, painters, truck drivers, farmers, pilots, cleaners, actors, musicians – they all get paid for work done as a clock ticks.
Creative work is not like that. Any one of the people listed above could create a method that would help other people to do their job in their place. This could be digitised, and made available on the internet. I have given away dozens of my trade secrets in this way, knowing that I could afford to do so, but also knowing that my trade secrets are also trademarks in a way – I have become known for a particular style of creativity that belongs to me, because I am its principal practitioner.
However, if someone pretends to be me, or pretends that something I have created should be available to them free (because creativity has less value than an hour's work by me as a musician in a pub) I wonder what has gone wrong with human morality and social justice.
When we look at wars we often find ourselves reverting to simple epithets: why can't people just get along? Vivre les differénces!!! So it would be better if music lovers treated music like food, and paid for every helping, rather than only when it suited them. Why can't music lovers just pay for music rather than steal it?
Would a return to John Peelism be better? There must have been music lovers who recorded his shows to tape and shared copies with friends. But it was never that easy, and was very time-consuming. You had to be really passionate about some music to share it in this way. Yes I think it would be better if music lovers had to work a little harder to find what they like best, and it was not quite so easy to knock out a digital copy to one's friends. The word 'sharing' surely means giving away something you have earned, or made, or paid for? At least you should have searched for it, and not simply happened on it by chance (or apparent chance…… the newly intelligent internet is now capable of sending you things that you never thought you wanted). It would be better if these 'sharers' had to set aside time to listen, and to work at listening, and thereby do honour to the creative work of musicians even if their final judgement was that the music they heard was not for them – not worth stealing, not worth sharing.
Now I'm being facetious, but some things are really worth stealing. A creative person would prefer their music to be stolen and enjoyed than ignored. This is the dilemma for every creative soul: he or she would prefer to starve and be heard, than to eat well and be ignored.
Radio is not like internet radio, or torrent sites. Radio pays musicians a fee when music is aired. Radio does not take the position that the public has a right to decide after hearing the music played whether to pay for it or not. Radio stations pay, and the public pay directly or indirectly in order to listen and make the judgement.
Suppose you asked a painter to paint your house on condition that if you didn't like the colour you had chosen, thinking it would work, you wouldn't pay him?
Peel was not a musician. He was a listener, a patron of the arts, a broadcaster with almost no censorial mandate or agenda. He only played what he thought deserved to be played. I don't think it always mattered that he himself liked it. In China in Chairman Mao's day he might have been sent to prison if only for being the first to play Jesus and Mary Chain, the Undertones or the Proclaimers – all of them were a little bit political, but also radical and outspoken. When I first heard them on John's show I thought they were a bit dangerous.
So if we assume that musicians want more than anything to be heard, and that there is now a massive audience wanting to hear new music every day, what is next?
What's next is already here. The BBC will not be thankful to me for saying this but if you have a decent computer and some internet bandwidth there are dozens of amazing internet portals where you can hear new music, and see new videos. SoundCloud, HypeRadio, Cull.TV, Spotify and Last.Fm all offer to take you on an extraordinary journey if you log in. Today, the 'era' and scope of modern music stretches broadly over a range of music styles, nationalities and age-ranges that might threaten to obfuscate the artistic achievements of individual musicians. (Sorry, I mentioned the art word). We might be overwhelmed by the amount of variation. (Especially without a John Peel to bring us up to speed every week). But a quick look at the way the internet has enriched the investigation of any particular musician's work can be proved by the expediency of searching – just to suggest a deliberately quirky example – 'Bjork' in Last.FM or Spotify. Along with all of Bjork's many bands and collaborations, we find the band Garbage, Tori Amos, mùm, Planning To Rock, Sigur Ros, Bat For Lashes and Fever Ray. They all line up to confuse and entice. Even iTunes might take you off on a strange, inspiring or disturbing journey if you search the appropriately left-field artist.
If you search my name you're likely to be spoon-fed tracks by Dave Dee, Dozy, Mick & Tich. This is the cross that Dave Dee etc has to bear, being compared with the Who on internet search engines.
What the BBC has to rise to is the challenge of using some its resources to sidestep editorial censorship, and give the listeners the kind of license they got when they tuned into John Peel. That license is offered free or almost free on dozens of amazing music blogs, sharing websites and video sites. There is more music being made today, and made ready for broadcasting, webcasting, podcasting and sharing, than ever before. I mean by this, finished, well-produced, good sounding music. And if it doesn't sound good you can be fairly sure it isn't meant to. There is a lot of talk about live music, and it is great that it's seen to be so important – but it's never gone away. In fact The Who shared the bill with John Peel once or twice, he took his radio show on the road regularly in the sixties and seventies. If the BBC were to start a website like Spotify, one thing would be certain, the musicians who were featured would get paid.
Speaking of which: my £6 fee for this lecture is being passed to the Musicians Union Benevolent Fund.
Thank you.
Text copied from The Guardian.
======================
Firstly I'm honoured to have been asked to do this first lecture in the name of John Peel. John and I were never close friends, and I know he was not always an unconditional Who fan, but through his long-time producer John Walters – who was a great friend to me and to Who drummer Keith Moon – I followed John Peel's career with the sense of a family insider. I don't want to kick off this series of annual lectures with any po-faced intellectualism. Nor do I want to talk about pop music as art (hard for me because music as art is my favourite subject). Neither do I wish to try to make this lecture amusing, or light-hearted or even ironic in the tradition of the sixties and post sixties pop era Peely and I shared. I don't want to try to celebrate John Peel, nor make this into any kind of memorial. That's all been done. So what do I want to do?
I have limited time. Looking at what John Peel did with his show on radio for many years is worth looking at. But I must assume that most listeners will know what he did. Annie Nightingale once told me that John was one of the few deejays at Radio 1 who would take home everything left in the in-tray cubbyholes at the end of each week. More than that, he listened to it all. Sometimes he played some records that no one else would ever have played, and that would never be played on radio again. But he listened, and he played a selection of records in the course of each week that his listeners knew (partly because the selection was sometimes so insane) proved he was genuinely engaged in his work as an almost unconditional conduit between creative musicians to the radio audience.
So he listened.
And he took chances with what he played.
And he is gone.
Why was John Peel's system important? Why is listening important? Why is being ready to give space to less polished music important? Will John Peelism survive the internet? Or is John Peelism thriving on the internet without many of us realising it?
So we have John Peel. The BBC. And – for the purposes of this lecture iTunes. All enormous icons in music.
Let me introduce you briefly to my inner artist, then I will put him back in his box.
I don't give a shit about making money. I think rock music is junk. I am a genius. The Who were OK but without me they would have all ended up working in the flower market, or worse - in Led Zeppelin. John Peel played some records that were so bad that I thought he was taking the piss sometimes. The BBC only gave us Pop Radio 1 in the 60s five years after the pirates had proved there was an audience for it. Sadly, unlike the pirates, they didn't accept payola.
I really should put this inner artist guy back in his box yes? Have we got our newspaper headlines yet?
This inner artist really doesn't give a shit about any of this lecture. Just give him a piano and a guitar and some decent way to record the music, a pleasant room to work in, and a few free hours, and he is happy. When he's done he hands me the end product and says – there, a work of genius, try and live off it for a while you philistine. It seems to me that a conversation between my inner artist with the late Steve Jobs would have been impossible. I seem to remember that once in an interview I let my artist out of the box for a minute too long and he said he wanted to cut Jobs's balls off. As I force my artist back in the box again, I hear him say that in fact he really likes his iPad and loves to noodle with GarageBand. My inner artist is a bit of an ageing Mod you see. He really thinks the late Steve Jobs was one of the coolest guys on the planet: loved his black outfits, cut his balls off, look at my red Vespa …etc. Irrational.
So there was pirate radio, then Radio 1, then a music shop. There were record companies and music publishers. Was it good, what the God of pop music had created?
Music publishing has always been a form of banking in many ways, but – in cooperation with record labels – active artists have always received from the music industry banking system more than banking. They've gotten…
1. editorial guidance
2. financial support
3. creative nurture
4. manufacturing
5. publishing
6. marketing
7. distribution
8. payment of royalties (the banking)
Today, if we look solely at iTunes, we see a publishing model that offers only the last two items as a guarantee, distribution and banking, with some marketing thrown in sometimes at the whim of the folks at Apple. It's a fantastic piece of software, I use it all the time and I was honoured once to meet the woman who wrote the software. But iTunes is not like radio.
Radio is less driven by cash flow, a little more driven by secondary income streams (like advertising, subscriptions or in the case of the BBC license fees), and thus needs its pop music to be cool, look hip, cover a wide array of bases and satisfy a broad market.
Let me quickly go over this list again. (do so). Now is there really any good reason why, just because iTunes exists in the wild west internet land of FaceBook and Twitter, it can't provide some aspect of these services to the artists whose work it bleeds like a digital vampire Northern Rock for its enormous commission?
Let's talk it through……
Item 1. Editorial guidance. A&R. Employ 20 A&R people from the dying record business. Have them respond to tracks sent in from new artists. If they feel the artists are bad, or aren't ready, say so. But have them tell the truth, kindly and constructively. Guide them to other helpful resources, don't just send them to the wolves of Blogland where it seems to me a lot of the vilest bile comes from people who could be drunk, or just nuts. A fledging musician at the start of a career is a delicate thing – even a rapper. (You'll just have to take my word for that.) (Apple do already have back-room people assessing what's hot, but they don't have this kind of power. I'll bet they'd love it. 20 John Peels inside Apple – imagine it).
Item 2. Financial support. Subsequently provide free computers with music software to 500 artists a year who the 20 A&R people feel merit it. Provide some basic training.
Item 3. Creative Nurture. Follow the work of these 500 artists very carefully. Help where you can. Keep out of the way if necessary.
Item 4. Manufacturing. (This should be called 'posting' today I suppose.) Provide a place on iTunes where these artists can share their music. It should be a like a local radio station. Yes Apple, give artists some streaming bandwidth. It will sting, but do it. You will get even more aluminum solid state LURVE for doing so.
Item 5. Publishing. Help artists protect their copyrights, don't just exploit the loopholes of Grand Theft. This is a minefield today. The internet is destroying copyright as we know it. So they will lose the battle, but guide them to hang on to what they can. Otherwise they might only ever make one album.
Item 6. Marketing. Select a number of the artists on the free shared space local radio station and sell their work on iTunes with some helpful advertising within the Apple software machine. Show that you get behind them.
Item 7. Distribution. Go further. License the best selling artists to other organisations (like record companies, bookshops and highstreet and Mall-based retailers for example) who are willing to make packages, goods you can hold in your hands and give for birthdays, Christmas and Diwali. Share revenue with Amazon. I'm not sure why that notion is so repellent to the Aluminums.
Item 8. Payment. Stop insisting on aggregators to deal with small artists (because you can't be bothered with the expense of accounting for the numerous small amounts of money you've collected on their behalf) and pay direct. Why should an artist pay even more commission to an aggregator merely to get paid? (For the uninformed, an aggregator in the iTunes world is a company who stand between the artist and iTunes and thus prevent Apple having to deal with artists directly. Some of these aggregators provide some of the resources I've pleaded for above, but they are really just another form of punitive banking).
So what does my inner artist think of all that? Doesn't he give a shit? I can tell you now, he thinks all that sounds really amazing. He wants to cry. If Apple do even one of the things on my wish-list he will offer to cut off his own balls (they've only ever been a distraction after all). Etc.
What creative people want is to know their music has been heard. They would prefer a response that was constructive than a positive or negative review. They would prefer expertise to opinion. They would like to know the public if they had a chance to hear the music, also had a chance to make up their own minds. They would prefer that in the long term the public were willing to pay for their music. But looking at the John Peel model what is clear is that just knowing there was a chance the great man would listen, react and offer the music on air, for whatever reason, was enough for budding musicians and bands.
That is where we must be going. Musicians need to be heard, to be judged, if possible to be paid, but also allowed to believe they had more than a single chance to get a hit. Software systems that offer this model will survive and prevail – loved and embraced by musicians of every sort – whatever happens financially.
Whether the public listen or not, creative writers and musicians should get paid if their work generates money by virtue of its mere existence on radio, television, YouTube, Facebook or SoundCloud. It's tricky to argue for the innate value of copyright from a position of good fortune (as I do). I once suggested on a forum that people who download my music without paying for it may as well come and steal my son's bike while they're at it. One woman was so incensed that she tried to argue that she was still supporting me as an artist by 'sharing' (my parentheses) music with others who would eventually filter down some cash in some form or other to me, that would pay for my son's bike – and she was not, in any sense, a thief or a criminal. I think she was in a kind of denial. Cutting the body to fit the cloth rather than the correct way around.
We now live in a digital world in which the only absolute is work by the hour. Lawyers, accountants, doctors, nurses, plumbers, painters, truck drivers, farmers, pilots, cleaners, actors, musicians – they all get paid for work done as a clock ticks.
Creative work is not like that. Any one of the people listed above could create a method that would help other people to do their job in their place. This could be digitised, and made available on the internet. I have given away dozens of my trade secrets in this way, knowing that I could afford to do so, but also knowing that my trade secrets are also trademarks in a way – I have become known for a particular style of creativity that belongs to me, because I am its principal practitioner.
However, if someone pretends to be me, or pretends that something I have created should be available to them free (because creativity has less value than an hour's work by me as a musician in a pub) I wonder what has gone wrong with human morality and social justice.
When we look at wars we often find ourselves reverting to simple epithets: why can't people just get along? Vivre les differénces!!! So it would be better if music lovers treated music like food, and paid for every helping, rather than only when it suited them. Why can't music lovers just pay for music rather than steal it?
Would a return to John Peelism be better? There must have been music lovers who recorded his shows to tape and shared copies with friends. But it was never that easy, and was very time-consuming. You had to be really passionate about some music to share it in this way. Yes I think it would be better if music lovers had to work a little harder to find what they like best, and it was not quite so easy to knock out a digital copy to one's friends. The word 'sharing' surely means giving away something you have earned, or made, or paid for? At least you should have searched for it, and not simply happened on it by chance (or apparent chance…… the newly intelligent internet is now capable of sending you things that you never thought you wanted). It would be better if these 'sharers' had to set aside time to listen, and to work at listening, and thereby do honour to the creative work of musicians even if their final judgement was that the music they heard was not for them – not worth stealing, not worth sharing.
Now I'm being facetious, but some things are really worth stealing. A creative person would prefer their music to be stolen and enjoyed than ignored. This is the dilemma for every creative soul: he or she would prefer to starve and be heard, than to eat well and be ignored.
Radio is not like internet radio, or torrent sites. Radio pays musicians a fee when music is aired. Radio does not take the position that the public has a right to decide after hearing the music played whether to pay for it or not. Radio stations pay, and the public pay directly or indirectly in order to listen and make the judgement.
Suppose you asked a painter to paint your house on condition that if you didn't like the colour you had chosen, thinking it would work, you wouldn't pay him?
Peel was not a musician. He was a listener, a patron of the arts, a broadcaster with almost no censorial mandate or agenda. He only played what he thought deserved to be played. I don't think it always mattered that he himself liked it. In China in Chairman Mao's day he might have been sent to prison if only for being the first to play Jesus and Mary Chain, the Undertones or the Proclaimers – all of them were a little bit political, but also radical and outspoken. When I first heard them on John's show I thought they were a bit dangerous.
So if we assume that musicians want more than anything to be heard, and that there is now a massive audience wanting to hear new music every day, what is next?
What's next is already here. The BBC will not be thankful to me for saying this but if you have a decent computer and some internet bandwidth there are dozens of amazing internet portals where you can hear new music, and see new videos. SoundCloud, HypeRadio, Cull.TV, Spotify and Last.Fm all offer to take you on an extraordinary journey if you log in. Today, the 'era' and scope of modern music stretches broadly over a range of music styles, nationalities and age-ranges that might threaten to obfuscate the artistic achievements of individual musicians. (Sorry, I mentioned the art word). We might be overwhelmed by the amount of variation. (Especially without a John Peel to bring us up to speed every week). But a quick look at the way the internet has enriched the investigation of any particular musician's work can be proved by the expediency of searching – just to suggest a deliberately quirky example – 'Bjork' in Last.FM or Spotify. Along with all of Bjork's many bands and collaborations, we find the band Garbage, Tori Amos, mùm, Planning To Rock, Sigur Ros, Bat For Lashes and Fever Ray. They all line up to confuse and entice. Even iTunes might take you off on a strange, inspiring or disturbing journey if you search the appropriately left-field artist.
If you search my name you're likely to be spoon-fed tracks by Dave Dee, Dozy, Mick & Tich. This is the cross that Dave Dee etc has to bear, being compared with the Who on internet search engines.
What the BBC has to rise to is the challenge of using some its resources to sidestep editorial censorship, and give the listeners the kind of license they got when they tuned into John Peel. That license is offered free or almost free on dozens of amazing music blogs, sharing websites and video sites. There is more music being made today, and made ready for broadcasting, webcasting, podcasting and sharing, than ever before. I mean by this, finished, well-produced, good sounding music. And if it doesn't sound good you can be fairly sure it isn't meant to. There is a lot of talk about live music, and it is great that it's seen to be so important – but it's never gone away. In fact The Who shared the bill with John Peel once or twice, he took his radio show on the road regularly in the sixties and seventies. If the BBC were to start a website like Spotify, one thing would be certain, the musicians who were featured would get paid.
Speaking of which: my £6 fee for this lecture is being passed to the Musicians Union Benevolent Fund.
Thank you.
Text copied from The Guardian.
August 18, 2009
Imogen Heap, Radiohead, The Junction, Built to Spill and Other Cool Stuff!
Spinner has the premiere of Imogen Heap's video for the track "First Train Home" from her new album Ellipse. I've really enjoyed Imogen's earlier albums and I'm looking forward to spending some quality time with Ellipse when it comes out August 25th.
Stereogum's got a pack of recent news:
- There's a new song out from Do Make Say Think. It's 10 minutes long and sounds cool to me. I'll have to check out more from this band. They're playing tomorrow night at the Polish Combatants Hall. Other tour dates are in the article.
- Built to Spill has a new album coming out. It's called There is no Enemy and it's coming out in October. I'm heading to the show on October 7th at Lee's Palace. It's not listed among the tour dates on Stereogum, but it is listed on the band's site.
- Radiohead have a new song out, but the rumours are still unconfirmed as to whether there's a new EP called Wall of Ice on its way. The torrent is spinning.
The New Rockstar Philosophy has a funny article about the recent trend of the major labels and iTunes trying to get music fans interested in buying albums again. I still prefer to buy albums over singles, but maybe that has more to do with the fact that I don't buy a lot of Top 40 music.
The New Music, former television show and current blog, posts some new music in the form of First Spins. However, they don't seem to keep them up for long. A couple that I wanted to check back later to give a listen are for Sean Bones and The Junction. Both are available on emusic. I like 'em.
August 13, 2009
Scarlett, Spinnerette, Stereophonics and Other Cool Stuff!
I read a number of RSS feeds on my Blackberry on my way to work every day. I save the one's I want to follow up on, either because they have some content I want to see or hear that doesn't come through on the Blackberry, or the feed is truncated and I want to read the rest of the article (I actively dislike it when feeds are truncated). Here are a few of the articles or posts I found interesting over the last while.
Scarlett Johansson is singing again. While the few songs I heard from her Tom Waits cover album didn't grab me, this new song with Scarlett and Pete Yorn sounds quite good. Spin has posted the video and has a brief article here.
Stereophonics are coming out with a new album called Keep Calm and Carry On. I've never been super into them, but I seem to have a lot of their music in my collection. I think that if I just spent some more time with their albums, they could really become a favourite. Guardian has an article on their pending release and about Ronseal records in general. Ronseal records are those albums that let the listener what they are via the album title.
NPR.org has a cool article on the Posies and how bands make money these days. Interesting that they never pocketed any money from their major-label albums. It's no wonder that the record business is in the tank and the music business seems to be going strong. When will those record company's realize that they are dinosaurs and that they're extinct?
Julian Plenti, also known as Paul Banks from Interpol, has released an album called Julian Plenti Is... Skyscraper. I really like Interpol and after giving this album a spin, I give it a thumbs up. It is available from emusic.
Spinnerette were on Letterman, sounding decidedly less keyboardy and poppy than they do on their latest, self-titled album.
More to come!
Scarlett Johansson is singing again. While the few songs I heard from her Tom Waits cover album didn't grab me, this new song with Scarlett and Pete Yorn sounds quite good. Spin has posted the video and has a brief article here.
Stereophonics are coming out with a new album called Keep Calm and Carry On. I've never been super into them, but I seem to have a lot of their music in my collection. I think that if I just spent some more time with their albums, they could really become a favourite. Guardian has an article on their pending release and about Ronseal records in general. Ronseal records are those albums that let the listener what they are via the album title.
NPR.org has a cool article on the Posies and how bands make money these days. Interesting that they never pocketed any money from their major-label albums. It's no wonder that the record business is in the tank and the music business seems to be going strong. When will those record company's realize that they are dinosaurs and that they're extinct?
Julian Plenti, also known as Paul Banks from Interpol, has released an album called Julian Plenti Is... Skyscraper. I really like Interpol and after giving this album a spin, I give it a thumbs up. It is available from emusic.
Spinnerette were on Letterman, sounding decidedly less keyboardy and poppy than they do on their latest, self-titled album.
More to come!
August 4, 2009
Canadian Copyright Consultations on Now
I don't want to be political or comment too much about what I think is right or wrong with the music business, but I think everyone agrees that copyright is a big part of the music business. It's a large part of how we enjoy (or can't enjoy) music in the Internet age.
In Canada, copyright consultations are now on and continue through September 13, 2009. It's important that those that have opinions on the subject share their opinions - that they are part of the process.
The Canadian government has created a web site to facilitate submission of opinion and dialog. Michael Geist who is a law professor at the University of Ottawa has a great blog page and has been posting regularly on the consultation content and process.
In Canada, copyright consultations are now on and continue through September 13, 2009. It's important that those that have opinions on the subject share their opinions - that they are part of the process.
The Canadian government has created a web site to facilitate submission of opinion and dialog. Michael Geist who is a law professor at the University of Ottawa has a great blog page and has been posting regularly on the consultation content and process.
August 15, 2008
post number one, this is post number one, isn't this a lot of fun
I have one major passion in life that's been with me since my dad bought me a radio in around 1976. Music.
So this blog will be about music. The music i like, new stuff I'm discovering and my opinions on music and the music business.
Hope you like it. Please feel free to leave comments and feedback.
So this blog will be about music. The music i like, new stuff I'm discovering and my opinions on music and the music business.
Hope you like it. Please feel free to leave comments and feedback.
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