Musosoup - stirring up artist support.

 

So, time has come to put my metaphorical money where my keyboard is, so to speak. Having spent a lot of time complaining about the iniquities of the music biz and its treatment of artists I've found something practical to do to fight back.

I've been talking to Chris Sharpe, founder of Musosoup this week. His plan is to level the playing field for artists, and in a new twist in the plot for those who for the most part write and promote them for free. The truth is that most music writing is done without payment, including magazines you can buy on the shelves at W.H. Smiths.  I've talked about Fireworks Magazine in the past, all volunteer run. It's main competitor, Powerplay - the work of Mark Hoaksey. If you look at the bottom of Americana UK website you will find a button asking for support, that pays for the hosting costs, our editor, Mark Whitfield, works at a University in the daytime and commits huge amounts of time to making a success of the website. Most bloggers, including me, spend their lives with nose applied to grindstone in other parts of the forest. Chris Sharpe was a PR and ran a music venue before the C***d, and like all of us had to find a way to keep the lights on.

What is Musosoup? It's a portal that aims to connect artists with those who canget their music noticed without being taken to the cleaners. £3 for a 48-hour window for bloggers, radio, podcasts to find you is not huge, Submithub. Musosoup's about page says: "Unlike other submission platforms that ask for a payment per submission to each individual curator, we ask for a one-off payment, and just one submission will put your music in front of the right people. No more spending hours researching who to submit to, our curators will come to you if your music suits." What's more the Curator, which is how they are describing the content providers, radio, writing, podcasting, can ask for a little towards the cost of marketing and their time. £5 or so is the average. This is not going to make us give up the day jobs, but it does make it possible to broadcast the world of independent artists to a much bigger audience.

The independent PR stands to gain from this as well. I will certainly be steering the artists I work with at Marketing4Music towards it. There are some committed people, like Katie at From The White House PR, and Continental Record Services in Holland who are not making vast sums of money off the back of their artists and doing great work for them, but if we can slow down the rise of Submithub leaching off the hopes and dreams of singers and bands then so much the better.

Learn about Musosoup HERE, and after a little rejigging of the blog pages there will be an affiliate link that artists can use up by the weekend. My first playlist of new music I've heard will be up at the weekend. yes, it will be on Spotify for all the same reasons I use a Google driven platform for this blog and Facebook for My Musix, everyone else is there and this is about the oxygen of publicity. Don't worry I will be posting links for the places where you can support the artist in a more practical fashion.

It's the end of the world as we know it... maybe Bandcamp can save us.

I'm not going to bang on about C*******s because much like everyone else I could do with hearing about something else at some point just to avoid worrying myself into a frenzy.

So as there are some generous musicians making music available for free I'm going to post some of those, while also encouraging you to support the portals that provide the best return to artists whose livlehood has simply gone.

So to start off John McLaughlin has offered his wonderful new album with Shankar Mahadevan and Zakir Hussain "Is That So?" for free until the end of April though his Bandcamp page. If you like that then take the time to look at some of his other albums.


Speaking of Bandcamp they are waiving all their revenue share for the 20th March from Midnight to Midnight Pacific Time, which is 7am in the UK. Bandcamp are the best way of giving the maximum amount of your money to the artists at any time. Today it's even better. Learn more about Bandcamp's support here.

 

Speaking of supporting the artist, there is also the labels. MoonJune Records are a one man label who describe themselves as exploring progressive, Jazz, Rock, Avant and Ethno music. This is not as scary as it sounds and they have some well known artists, Soft Machine, Gong and others as well as some great people you will never have heard of. Try Dwiki Dharmawan for instance. They offer some name your own price compilations, which are great value. The booking agency that keeps the label afloat has unsurprisingly no business, so consider buying a few things from them today

MoonJune's Bandcamp page here

More on their plight at Sonic Perspectives here

That's all for now I'll leave you with a fab version of The Creator Has A Masterplan from McLaughlin and Santana. I certainly hope he does...

 

CD vs Vinyl (again)

If you don't read the Super Deluxe Edition blog then you should. As well as all the latest releases, editor Paul Sinclair always has an interesting comment on the state of the industry.

This week he has posted on the format wars, and I'm pleased to say agrees with my opinion that the vinyl revival is over hyped and that CD is in fact king.

Read it HERE and subscribe to his newsletter which is a good source of though provoking views.

It wasn't like this in my day...

My daughter came home from working in Scotland last week and we were talking on the way about some of the music she is listening to. She seems to be more aware of music and to have more decided opinions than many of her generation. She consumes it via Apple Music and You Tube and Instagram in about equal measure. For the record she is 20.

Comment 1 - There aren't many distinctive singers.

She isn't a fan of singers powered by AutoTune. Having had singing lessons herself and sung in choirs and all sorts of social settings she seems to have some disdain for those singers whose careers she feels are built on image more than actual vocal talent. Cheryl (Cole or whatever) comes up for question here. Score one for good old fashioned talent.

Comment 2 - Rappers are more important than singers as conveyors of messages

This I suppose is a matter of the particular flavour of "pop" music that you consume. Where to earlier generations, Dylan, Rotten, Weller, Sly Stone, Gil Scott Heron or whoever would have been the social commentators of choice, now it is Drake, Stormzy and Kanye who are the influencing factor, although seldom about politics.

Comment 3 - DJs are the taste makers and main influencing factor

She uses the term "DJ" interchangeably with "record producer", assuming that anyone who makes records will also present them in a "live" environment as a mix set.

So, who does she like? 

Current favourites are singer/songwriters Mabel and Billie Eilish. Both of these come from entertainment industry backgrounds, Mabel is the daughter of Neneh Cherry and producer Cameron McVey for instance.They are both seen as having distinctive voices in a sea of bland. Dua Lipa gets an honourable mention in this category. Another thumbs up here, as I think she is broadly right about the bland thing, and I could listen to any of these three on the radio.

Producer/DJs that are on the radar include David Guetta, Tiesto and Martin Garrix. These do have "signature" sounds making them more producer than DJ in my book. Calvin Harris was OK but a bit mainstream.

Rappers, she has always been a fan of Eminem, despite  some parental disapproval of his language in earlier years (help, I've turned into my Dad!). Current fav is Cardi B. This is where I turn middle aged and say I cannot understand Ms B or her peers. the music which seems to mostly comprise high speed drum machine beats, that I imagine are meant to sound like automatic gunfire, and nursery rhyme tunes in between raps that spend most of their time explaining that she can afford two pairs of expensive trainers at a time. Allegedly "Cardi B identifies as a feminist" in which case my definition of that term needs some updating. Cardi (if I can be that familar) seems to spend her life in a social media driven whirl which seems to drive everything from her clothes to her relationship choices, up to and including her child who may well want to change her name from Kulture Kiari Cephus at the earliest opportunity.

Back to my daughter's music choices. She does also like Queen, Green Day, Abba (the Mamma Mia films helped here), and has also had a moment with of the music from the film Rock of Ages. at that point I had a nano second of coolness, but don't worry it didn't last.

What does this mean in terms of my life on the iPod? To paraphrase Nick Hornby's book 33 Songs, nothing I like is "pop music" anymore. I'm quite comfortable with this and didn't honestly think it was, but the fact is that when said daughter read this blog a few minutes ago her reaction to my comments about Cardi B was to tell me about her wealth and her 5 cars that she can't drive. And that is the real difference between then and now, it's all about the celebrity, not the music.  

Taylor Swift and her rights.

Now there's a name you never expected to see here. But the issue of rights has been brought into focus by a name as big as hers having the masters of her first 6 albums sold as part of a deal to acquire her previous label by impresario Scooter Braun (Justin Beiber and a million smaller names). As Swift's albums were reportedly 80% of the revenue of the Big Machine Group labels these were the obvious target of the acquisition. There is more on Swift's personal situation on Pitchfork.

Having just listened to Kenney Jones (Small Faces, Faces, The Who) autobiography on audiobook, the story of his contract issues with Don Arden in the 1960s sounds very similar. Robert Fripp's tales of his battles with E.G. Records and plenty of other artists, all of whom signed contracts they didn't understand early in their careers with stars in their eyes.

In other areas of employment the law protects the employee rigorously, often at the employer's expense. So, why are artistic rights not subject to some sort of protection. If Swift signed her contract in 2005 as reported then she was 16. So presumably her parents were involved in the deal, but from what I can find out are not lawyers or music industry people. Should there not be some sort of oversight when a contract involves someone young, perhaps under 21, making long term deals. Master recordings are of course for ever. I remember Swift's first album showing up on EMusic and thinking it was a perfectly good piece of modern mainstream country, not my thing, but I doubt she has missed my spending. I can sympathise with her as these recordings will now get hawked about for compilation albums and get repackaged as new product. Assuming she still holds the publishing rights (Sony/ATV from a look at one of my daughter's Taylor albums) then she will do alright, but everytime she sings one of the songs on these albums in concert she will be propping up the Scooter Braun empire, which will grate I'm sure.

Only a Northern Song

As an aside The Beatles' early catalogue was published by Northern Songs only to have music publisher Dick James sell the company on Brian Epstein's death. The full story is here, fairly accurately. Suffice to say the catalogue is now on it's sixth owner. Songwriting publishing is more lucrative than selling product so tends to get fought over by bands, rights holders, and business generally more aggressively. The fate of Northern Songs probably explains why the super deluxe editions of Beatles albums started with Sgt Peppers where McCartney, Starr, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison have a stake in the publishing.

The price for your cheap streaming is...

  On Saturday Anil Prasad of Innerviews, a long standing online music magazine that is always worth reading, posted a series of tweets about streaming. I have banged on about this before here but you can't overstate the problem that moving to streaming is causing for the production of new music. These are the basic figures given by Innerviews, that are easily verifiable elsewhere online.

1 Stream on YouTube = $0.00069 1 Stream on Spotify = $0.00437 1 Stream on Apple Music = $0.00735 1 Stream on Tidal = $0.01250 1 Stream on Amazon Music = $0.00402

And it is all in dollars so for those with currency transactions to worry about the net income is even lower. 

As Prasad points out this explains why the gaps between albums and tours get ever longer. They can't afford it. Elvis may very well be working down the chip shop in fact. An established artist of my acquaintance with 5 gold and platinum discs on his wall spends most of his time working in his wife's craft supplies business as he can make better money packing candles than he can playing music.

Music is more available than at any time due to the internet and mobile phones, but the drive to having a streaming app on every phone and unlimited usage for £10 a month or less will affect the ability to produce new music. You may shrug your shoulders and say so what I only listen to the old stuff, and far too many people do. But to have a sustainable model for creative growth, we need new music coming along, if nothing else to draw new listeners into the back catalogue. People will always want to make music, and the opportunity to do so is greater than ever thanks to the same technology that is restricting the ability to make a career out of it. 

Music as a business is imperiled more than at any other time. Recorded music came along and took over from sheet music as the primary source of income, sheet music replaced performance and patronage and we have now come to the point where the sale of recorded music needs to be replaced as the primary income generator. For a while it looked like patronage was back thanks to crowd funding, but the recent Pledge music debacle (if you don't know about that google Pledge Music Danny Vaughn) has made the customers wary of committing to that. Live music? venues are shutting all over the country, The Borderline in London is only the most high profile, and with ticket prices moving slowly out of reach of regular attendance who knows what will happen to that.

The much reported "end of iTunes" , which is in fact anything but, will drive more people to streaming services which helps the dominant companies of the internet age but at the expense of pretty much everyone else. So if you want to support an artist buy their physical product (CD, LP) or at least their download, but don't think that by streaming their music you are helping.

Record Store Day - It's a Niche

In January BBC News added to the hours spent predicting the death of physical sales and bemoaning the rise of streaming. We have also had the collapse and revival of HMV, and seen that also blamed on streaming. As it's Record Store Day again, and once again it's all vinyl, vinyl, vinyl. Time to look at some stats showing the current state of music sales and see how they measure up to the hype.

The headlines always focus on the decline in physical numbers of CD sales and the percentage growth of vinyl sales. In 2018 there were 4.2 million vinyl records sold new, about £60 million worth ^. CD sales were 32 million, while this was a decline in quantity, value held fairly steady at £450 million*.  Downloading took the biggest hit declining to £35 million worth, bearing mind that a lot of these"unit sales" are single songs rather than albums. Streaming music sales pulled in £829 million '. So overall music sales are worth around £1.5 billion. This is a decline of about 41% by value since the peak in 2000.

Some facts:

• The overall music business is worth about 4.5 billion, with live music, merchandising, exports, and publishing included. Allowing for inflation this is about the same as in 2000. So live music and the rest has grown significantly since then
• The death of HMV blamed on streaming was in fact about DVD sales collapse, which fell by 45% in 2018~. 
• The real vinyl revival is in second hand discs, which don't show up in sales figures. Talking to several record shop owners recently suggests that their sales are booming. But then so are their cd sales.
• Ebay, Discogs & Amazon Marketplace UK used cd sales amounted to nearly £500 million in 2018 ".

The biggest selling albums in the UK in 2018 accordnig to the Official Charts Company by physical & digital sales were:

What does all this tell us?

• Old folks buy cds, (vinyl in this context is next to non existent), young people buy digital, and Christmas (Now 101) makes a big difference. 
• Physical sales are more healthy than it seems on first inspection
• Physical media of all sorts are becoming a niche or hobbyist market. Knitting is worth about £400 million interestingly...
• HMV with £250 million of sales is critical to the survival of the market, Independent shops prop up the hobby end of the market but don't compete on volume sales
• The supermarkets (particularly Tesco & Sainsburys) largely exiting the cheap cd market has hit sales but not damaged value much. 
• The markets for streaming and physical media are almost totally mutually exclusive.
• Those in their 20s or younger consume music as they do video or games, it isn't "special" to them in the way it is to older demographics

So don't believe the vinyl hype CDs, downloads, and streaming all have their place. The big problem comes in a decade or so when us old people have all stopped buying physical media and the age of music as a mass market medium ends. 

^ Source  - The Vinyl Factory 4.1.19
* Source  - UK Investor magazine 3.1.19
' Source  - Music Business worldwide 3.1.19
~ Source - Variety 9.2.19
" Source - Den Of Geek 12.3.19

A bit of interaction goes a long way

This started life as an appreciation of a musician I like and follow, but turned into a business blog, so while it is posted here, it's true home is my Linkedin platform.

Back in 2001 I read and occasionally contributed to an email newsletter called The Armada, basically about the band Asia but drifting into other related artists. I commented on a then new album called Ceremony of Innocence by Radioactive. A few days later I got an email from the album's creator Tommy Denander thanking me for my comments and after a brief exchange of emails that was it. Or so I thought...

Having seen his name appear on albums regularly I did make an effort to look out for him, as he seemed to be a stamp of quality on a rock album. The recently re-released Rainmaker album is a good place to start. In a slightly surreal moment he also popped up on an album by Big Time Rush, a TV show boy band loved by my then 12 year old daughter and her friends.

Tommy is typical of the way the music industry works in the 21st Century. His Wikipedia entry, which I assume to be largely accurate, gives hundreds of albums he has played on, written, or produced. It's an impressive list, and crosses all sorts of genres, which is what you need to do to make a living in music these days. However it's clear his heart is in rock, projects with his own name on them, Radioactive and as an integral part of work by House Of Lords, Robin Beck, Houston and many others in the Hard Rock/AOR world. These names may not mean much to you but in the rest of Europe, particularly Scandanavia, this genre is huge, and Tommy is one of the leading lights.

The interesting part of looking at Tommy's website and social media are the parallels between the way he manages his business, and it is a business with all the requirements to feed and house his family that the rest of us have, and the way pretty much any other business owner will operate. OK so we aren't working with Deep Purple and Alice Cooper, but the networking required to secure that work, presumably through producer Bob Ezrin is the same process that I go through at an FSB or 4Networking meeting. Interestingly we are second connections on Linkedin as well, (happy to help you make a bit more of your Linkedin Tommy!). The basic rules of networking work in pretty much any arena, and as I am looking at new avenues for my own efforts it is a timely lesson. We all get a bit jaded by the formulaic approach of many business networks, but it works, at least it does for me and Tommy. So, get out there and talk to people, on Linkedin, in the queue at the bank, any venue that business people gather, you never know where the next opportunity is going to come from.

Recently he started a new line called Platinum Demo's Worldwide, offering professional quality demo's for €250. As, from reading his social media, he has a young daughter he clearly wants to work from home more, this is a cracking way of doing that, with potential to root out new talent that can be presented to his contacts in the biz, as well as making money on the actual demos themselves. Oddly as my venture in Marketing 4 Music gathers pace I could see myself using his service, in fact I have a client just now...

To learn more about Tommy Denander's music start here

Radioactive - Ceremony Of Innocence and F4UR
Sayit - Again
Alice Cooper - Paranormal
Deep Purple - Infinite
Frederiksen/Denander - Baptism By Fire

Yes - Flight Delayed

I said last time that I had ordered the rejigged Fly From Here album - Return Trip, and that review would follow. Pledge Music managed to upload faulty files (twice at least). The mp3 files I have show at least one loud "pop" on track 3, and faults on another track that was uploaded to Soundcloud for free download. I managed to reduce the pop to manageable levels with Audacity and am happy enough. Replacements for all files have been promised and were allegedly on line on 2nd May (if so can't find them).

The music? Oh yes! Compared to the 2011 version it is a richer sound, more keyboards, and Squires bass higher in the mix. Horn says he took singing lessons before embarking on the vocals, and while he is still not the strongest singer the Buggles vibe (and these were Buggles songs first) works for me. It's more evident than ever that Benoit David (singer of 2011 album) was following a guide vocal from Horn. The main let down remains Steve Howe's guitar. On the early parts he appears to be using a Stratocaster giving a very thin reedy sound, where his ES175 or something like that would have given a much more "Yes" sound. They could have worked that over as well surely and turned this into the last great Yes album.

In the end having now heard the most recent studio album Heaven & Earth I won't be back for more. Archival live albums certainly. Repeating the 7 shows from '72 box set with possibly the Union Tour or the "Ten True Summers" tour from 1979 where plenty of high quality bootlegs exist.

Pledge Music have taken responsibility for the whole download mess, and Geoff Downes has tweeted the bands apology. But given that it takes about 5 minutes to rip a CD to a FLAC or mp3 file why all the problems?

One question has to be why did Yes go the Pledge Music route, are they not marketable enough to make the release of the new album attractive to a label? Or is it as I would suspect the usual with Yes, shooting themselves in the foot by simply being bad at business.

eMusic - An Update

I have just published an update on my August rant about eMusic. Find it on Linkedin HERE

Kim Edgar - A name you should know.

Out there in the world there are hundreds, thousands of people quietly making a living from music sitting off the radar as far as the average music lover is concerned.

Last year Kim Edgar visited us in Crianlarich. here she is in the bar at The Ben More promoting her show. Sadly I didn't get to see her play, (drinks to serve, plates to clear) but I did investigate her albums, and found gold.

You may think you can classify her music by looking at the website and have parceled her off as folky singer/songwriter, true up to a point but each of her albums has a definite character and, most unusual in today's musical climate, show her writing and performing maturing and evolving.

Debut "Butterflies and Broken Glass" appeared in 2008 and drew the inevitable, lazy, comparisons with Sandi Thom and Amy MacDonald. Kim's songwriting was more assured and the arrangements less obvious than either of those relentlessly commercial artists. A review said "very moving, literate, allusive and expressively sung", and they were right, another review clearly written by some who had listened on fast forward described it as slick folk pop, no!

Album two "The Ornate Lie" in 2012 was a step forward particularly musically. Extra bite to the songs, a bigger production, and a more confident performance overall. The Tori Amos influence was more overt this time, but a perceptive review spotted signs of Aimee Mann as well.  

Most recently "Stories Untold" from 2016, is less ornate. Simpler arrangements, more folk, less Tori. Some of the songs, particularly 'Significant Other Deceased' remind me of Cara Dillon. It sounds like Kim has wanted to focus the listener on the lyrics, which have again taken a step forward. Try 'Well Worn' and especially 'Things Crack, Then Shatter' an affecting song simply sung and played.

As well as her solo work Kim plays, mostly in Germany, with the band Cara operating more in the Irish music world, does sessions, workshops, and directs choirs. So overall she is making a living (as far as I can see) playing her music, and finding an audience. In 2017 that is an achievement. The inevitable stripped down, keyboard & guitar live shows are part of life (Over The Rhine make the same compromise). She reminds me of Nerina Pallot in some ways, although she is 6 albums into her career has gone the big label route a couple of times, and had closer brushes with the "big time". But Nerina seems from the outside at least to have made more effort to satisfy commercial demands and her albums are less consistent and only intermittently hit the highs routine in Kim's music.

I've talked before about the difficulties of making a living in music, Kim has a good website, has the Social Media firing and gets good reviews for albums and live work. But you haven't heard of her and you should. Kim Edgar is a major talent, the equal and better of anyone in her field. As a fan I would like her to be heard widely and receive the rewards her music deserves (try Bandcamp Kim). This may of course not be what Kim wants.

Why I'm giving up on eMusic

I joined eMusic in 2005. If you don't know eMusic it is a subscription based music download service. The content is sourced mainly from independent labels,with a lot of catalogue secured, until recently, through The Orchard & CD Baby.

In my Linkedin articles recently I have been looking at the way companies disregard their customer base leading to loss of said customer & ultimately the business. eMusic make a great object lesson in what not to do, so here are some of the ways that a once great service has been brought down, and left me and many others throwing up our hands and saying "ENOUGH".

Play Pass The Parcel With Your Business.

 eMusic was launched in 1995, that's four years before iTunes. Since then it has been variously owned by its founders, Vivendi (French media company), JDS Capital Management (venture capital), and was most recently acquired in 2015 by TriPlay an Israeli cloud computing company. Each time senior management was changed and from the number of people listing eMusic as a past company on Linkedin, staff left in droves after each takeover. The upshot of this of course was a lack of expertise, continuity or direction in the business leading to...

Frequent Changes in Business Model and Direction

Or, how to confuse your customers. With content rooted solidly in independent music and strong catalogues in Classical, New Age and other niche areas eMusic had a great USP, something that allowed it to stand apart from the fights between iTunes and the big labels. Then in 2009 the majors, Sony, then Warners and Universal crept onto the site, in the USA at least. The then CEO however stated in The New York Times "the future of eMusic, like its past, is in pursuing not the fickle mainstream but the passionate fringe". The U.K. store stayed with the independents, presumably due to rights issues.Then in 2014 the major labels disappeared again. There was a renewed commitment to the independent arena. With new owners came another shift to sourcing catalogue from 7Digital, meaning that on the site's relaunch in May 2017 much of the content disappeared, again presumably due to rights issues. Each relaunch was of course accompanied by new branding. An image search on Google brings up 9 different logos.

Something to Tempt The Buyer...

7Digital don't appear to distribute a number of the best known independent labels, Warp & Eagle Rock have gone completely and Rough Trade have only 27 albums on the site for instance. There are no meaningful new releases, oh there is new music every week, mostly obscure compilations, bootleg live albums and out of copyright jazz and classical. The customers want the new releases they hear on the radio and read about online or in the magazines, and which were always on the old version of eMusic. For me notable absences are the latest Public Service Braodcasting album (they have everything else from them so why not this?) and the new Peter Perrett album which they are advertising but, at least in the U.K. is not available to buy. I could go on, other customers are on the Emusers forum. One of my main labels of interest Frontiers (Italian based so no U.S.rights clashes I guess) is still adding new content so it can be done.

Ignore The Customers And Hope They Go Away 

The @emusichelps Twitter has been silent since 9th May. the main @emusic one posts a couple of hopeful items per month and the old noticeboard died with its website. The main means of communication is through a Reddit page meaning that the posts about poor customer service, disappearing content and departing customers are hidden away, out of sight, out of mind. The new website looks ok and does fix a few problems from the old one, but is very hard to navigate, and searching for anything specific is now a lot harder, assuming you can find anything in the first place. Oh and integration to iTunes has gone as well.


There may be legitimate reasons for the problems, new websites have issues I recognise that, but if eMusic are working away in the background to solve the problems, they aren't telling the customers. And they need to; soon, while they still have a business. If they aren't doing anything because the switch to 7Digital's platform has fundamentally broken the business, then own up to it, and start fixing it.

The obvious take away from all this is that this weeks owners neither understand or care about their customer base. The community aspect of eMusic expressed through various forums was one of its strengths. The fact that it appealed to the music obsessive (me!) who wanted to dig into the site and find long forgotten albums and new obscurities was another. The decision to move to 7Digital was clearly made on a cost basis and seems to sum up the whole "relaunch". It won't do eMusic, It won't do.

Postscript

I have just been sent a user satisfaction survey by email. You can guess how it went, but the concerning thing is that the headline "we are thinking about doing this" items were Hi Res audio (good), major label content (see above), and connectivity to smart watches, TVs and car radios. There's something about fiddling while Rome burns here I feel...