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.

What a pile of old tosh!

I like Asia, and while fully accepting the corporate rock accusation that gets leveled at them, they do know a good tune when they write one. Their studio albums, all through their career, have been well produced and generally sound great. So why can't they make a decent live album?

And it's not just them. I love a live album although I'm aware not everybody does. They can, however, be an excuse for profiteering and what we might politely term sharp practice (aka stealing). The Asia box set Quadra is a case in point. When I saw it for a fair price at Missing Records I bought it on the theory that not all 4 discs could be terrible. Wrong. Lightly burnished audience tapes, the worst of which was probably recorded some miles from the venue, and the best standing next to one of "those" concert goers. You know the one who recognises every song with a sigh or a whoop.
Overall a 3 out of 10 at best.

The money for old rope trick seems to be getting performed ever more regularly when it comes to live albums. The internet is full of places to download rubbish radio shows, bootlegs in fact, but you can pay for the self same shows on Amazon. Steely Dan, who frankly have only themselves to blame for the market in substandard shows, currently have about 20 albums usually of the same couple of broadcast concerts from 1974 and 1993. The most blatant is an audio rip of their PBS concert from 2000 available officially on DVD.

Of course the artists and their representatives see no benefit from these releases by and large. Although they do on occasion promote them as if they do. There are two well known shows by Renaissance that have been bootlegged for years. They were released by a proper record label (Cleopatra) in 2015, but this one at least has had no work to improve it at all as far as I can tell. The first few minutes have badly phasing which is still present on the paid for version. These were pushed by the official band outlets as new quality product.

As a fan I'm interested in hearing anything worthwhile by the artists I follow, hwoever I can honestly say that I have only ever come across a couple of bootlegs, or ROIO (Records Of Illegitimate/Indeterminate Origins) that I think are worth the attention*. They are:

Steely Dan: Mannassas 1996.
Procol Harum: Aalborg 2003
Yes: Union Tour London 1991
Phish: Chula Vista 1997

Probably a couple more but I can't think of them at present. The above all available on Amazon and
for free in some of the murkier corners of the web. Somehow I have avoided the part of the collecting bug that involves owning every note ever played by a given band or artist, preferring to stick to what they think is worth passing onto the public. Asia seem particularly prone to foisting substandard live product on us. Leaving aside a few of their more recent releases which have had the full DVD/CD treatment they are mostly ROIO in all but name.

*For the record I was indoctrinated by Robert Fripp's maxim about recording of live shows being like taking notes of a private conversation early on - so radio shows tend to be as far into this murky world as I get.

Elbow Bristol Canons Marsh Amphitheatre June 29th 2019

Elbow have been touring festivals around Europe and have been playing mostly fairly short sets of fan favourites. The weather turned out kind for this outdoor show, part of the Bristol Sounds series being held on the waterfront in the city centre, probably to the relief of bands, promoters and audience.

Elbow are one of the best current mainstream live bands, the songs take on new dimensions in performance compared to their sometimes slightly antiseptic studio albums. The three songs from the Little Fictions album are good examples. The title song and ‘Kindling’ particularly have matured nicely over the last couple of years in concert, compared to their (to me) occasionally disappointing original recordings.This was a fan pleasing set with nearly all their best audience participation numbers as well as a new song that appears to be called Empires. Guy Garvey is the supreme frontman of his generation, holding the audience, not all of whom seemed to be regular concertgoers, in the songs and through a tale of a band night out involving bass player Pete Turner and copious amounts of beer. The fact that despite conspicuous success and doubtless its trappings he remains firmly connected to his audience speaks volumes for the man and his band.  

The set list is published here, and built to the three big "joining in" songs, ‘Lippy Kids’ (my personal favourite Elbow song), the inevitable ‘One Day Like This’ and ‘Grounds For Divorce’. And then they were gone, the 11pm curfew meant no encore, but we got what we came for, the songs, which are of such a consistent high quality that they can still step back fifteen years and find songs worthy of an airing.So why did the people to my right have to keep chatting through the quiet bits? My Sad Captains was particuarly affected. Surely they paid the same ticket price we did, so why not LISTEN!

Support was from Another Sky who were not helped by the usual bottom of the bill sound problems. A Google of their appearances at SXSW and on Later suggests this was not their best night. Villagers are never going to be my new favourite band, they just seem to lack bite, and frankly the Flugelhorn moments had me diving for the beer bus. Anyway we were there to see Elbow who delivered as they always do. A new song suggests a new album, and they have recorded shows on the last few tours so hopefully a nice CD/DVD live box set will appear at some point.

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.

More reviews and a radio show

  I was lucky enough to review two really good albums recently over at Americana UK.

W.C.Beck's "First Flight" is fairly standard Alt.Country fare at first listen but reveals it self over time as a properly good album, no filler.

The star turn though is The Alvarez Theory's debut album. If this doesn't crop up on my end of year best of then there will be some truly great albums coming soon. Also the first LP record I have played in about 25 years. The Alvarez Theory, by the way, explains why the Dinosuars died out...

Lastly but by no means leastly Blairs Blues is a roots music show, Americana, Blues and the like, recorded twice a month in Bristol for a Canadian station. You can hear it on Mixcloud here. Blair Chadwick is a good chap to chat to about music as well so please support him.

With all this listening to Americana, I'm confronted by a truth about my music habits. I can't stick to any one thing for long, but the main theme of all this is tunes. I like a decent tune and at the moment roots music seems  to be providing that. The Prog I like is mostly of the shorter more song based variety (can't do ELP), so my new  comment if someone asks what music I like is "anything with a decent tune".

And then a friend persuaded me to try Tom Waits...

The answer will always be 42...

I'm not sure how I found The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy originally, probably at School, probably someone brought in the novel. I had bought, read, and re-read the novel before I had picked up on the fact that it was a radio show.That meant I was just in time for the repeats of all 12 initial episodes, and I've been listening on and off ever since.

What is the appeal of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, or H2G2 as it will be known from here on in? Douglas Adams had a particular way of writing. If you get it then it is the funniest thing in the world, if you don't you are likely to be shaking your head at the daftness of it all. The sanitised H2G2 film and the Netflix version of Dirk Gently both lose something from trying to be funny for everyone, particularly Americans.

It can be easy to tell an Adams fan, they often, unconsciously I'm sure, end up repeating lines from his work as they are simply great lines to use in many situations. His brief spell working on Dr Who scripts left an indelible impression on his writing, bits of it popped up in H2G2 and Dirk Gently, and on the rebooted Dr Who of recent years. What little humour there is in that is mostly in a style aping Adams. The unfilmed serial "Shada" which he wrote has been completed as an audio drama by Big Finish and was novelised very sympathetically by Gareth Roberts who is clearly a fan. Sadly other Dr Who adaptations are rubbish and should be avoided at all costs.

 According to Adams the answer to everything in the universe is 42, but like most things in the H2G2 no explanation is offered. In the real world Adams when asked why it was 42 just said, "because it is". That sums up most of his work, Why is it funny? Because it is!

25th May is celebrated as Towel Day by Adams fans. Learn more by reading Neil Gaiman's biography and  the great man's work, but stick to the audio versions, the pictures are better.

Update 25th May 2020: I wrote a piece on Linkedin a few years ago, using sme of the best Adams quotes to illustrate some business points. I've given it a wash and brush up and you can read it here.

Americana UK

I've just started writing for the website Americana UK. My first review was a Bluegrass album by Chris Jones and The Night Drivers. Find it HERE