David Emery Online

To make a change from simply going on about the music business I thought it’s high time to feature some actual music. That, and it means I don’t need to write much.

First up is the rather stupendously wonderful Bon Iver. I would normally flounder around trying to come up with words good enough to do him justice, but I know I won’t manage it so I won’t. Just go and buy the album.

Next we have Magistrates, who seem to be getting a little bit of hype right now, due to a certain Radio 1 DJ whose name rhymes with Dane Towe. The hype is more then justified, though, as they sound something like a cross between Klaxons and Vampire Weekend – and if that combination isn’t going to generate hype then what is?

The Magistrates – The Inbetweens

Having filled my credibility-o-meter, I will now – in one fell swoop – undo all my hard work by talking about much maligned Reading band Does It Offend You, Yeah? For some reason – other then having a stupid name – they seem to have got a bit of a bad reputation, but their debut album is really very good. Forget the electro-y stylings of their previous singles (as good as they are), the rest of the album is far more guitar based and all the better for it (in a Bloc Party-ish sort of way).

Finally, remember Forward Russia? Yes, you know – the matching t-shirts, the naming-songs-after-numbers thing? I bet you didn’t even know they had an album out, did you? I didn’t until after it was out, which was a bit of a surprise although not as much as a surprise as when I heard it – it’s really good. A big step forward from their debut, it trades immediacy for depth, short sharp tracks for sprawling epics and makes it really work.

So last week I talked about the Coldplay free track giveaway. Since then it’s gone on to be downloaded – for free – over 2 million times. This week they’ve stopped the free download, and started selling it on iTunes.

So, you’d think that with over 2 million people having the song already – in essentially the same format as you get from iTunes – would dent the sales a bit, right? After all, isn’t this akin to the biggest, most publicised leak ever?

It’s currently Number 1 in the iTunes charts, ahead of the likes of Madonna, Sam Sparrow and Wiley, and looks set to go top 10 in the singles chart tomorrow on download sales alone.

I think you would say that’s pretty successful, don’t you think? Yes Coldplay are a big band and the strategy relies on their built up brand recognition, but how many more examples of free track promotion working are we going to have to have before we can put this ridiculous fear of leaks behind us?

In contrast, I think we can conclude that we’re almost over the ‘album distribution revolution’ before it’s even really begin. The Nine Inch Nails album (as talked about here) is one of their most cohesive albums in years, and a real triumph, but has got next to no press even though it’s been given away for free. You would sort of expect a whole load of online buzz about it at the very least, but I think they got all the press they were going to get when they did something similar on ‘Ghosts I-IV’.

Giving an album away for free no longer works as a promotional strategy.

That story has been written – it’s time to come up with a different one.

Today Nine Inch Nails have taken the next obvious step and released their next album ‘proper’ (as Ghosts I-IV wasn’t really a proper NIN album) for free:

http://theslip.nin.com/

Is this clever or is this defeatist?

The previous experiments (worth noting) all contained some element of commerce about them; Radiohead with the pay-what-you-want and NIN with the ‘get 1/4 free, but pay for the rest’ model with Ghosts (Raconteurs I think just miss this list as their release was a manipulation of the traditional retail model, not something completely different). With The Slip however, Nine Inch Nails have given no option for people to compensate them or reward them for producing this music.

Not even a PayPal donate button.

What kind of statement does that put out? ‘We don’t think this music is worth paying for’? ‘We don’t think music is worth paying for’? Or is it just a practical recognition that their audience would probably go and download it anyway, and they will hopefully generate enough promotional value from it to drive sales of the forthcoming traditional release?

Is the statement ‘We think this music is only worth promotional value to us’?

I think it will be quite interesting to see what kind of media impact this release gets – especially in comparison to previous NIN albums – as I get the feeling that the ‘band releases album on the internet in an unconventional way’ story (and the ‘band release album for free’ story, for that matter) is getting pretty tired. While I’m quite certain that giving away music for free is probably a net win, in terms of word of mouth popularity, I’m not that for a big band it can compete with the swathes of publicity you would normally get around a release.

I would have been quite happy to pay for this album, even if there was a free version available. Especially considering I know that money would go direct to the band, which you never feel sure of if you’re buying a CD in a shop. I’m sure I can’t have been the only one…

The headline seen across the web yesterday:

Coldplay single downloaded by 600,000 people

Obviously the concept of giving away music for free is hardly a new one – Radiohead blah blah blah… – but I think this is an interesting spin on it. The role of the traditional single is to basically act as a loss leader for the album, getting the band played on the radio and generating publicity.

Giving it away for free in this manner seems to achieve pretty similar goals, without having to mess around with all that tiresome selling.

600,000 is a pretty big figure, and if you managed to sell that many you’d be laughing (although not necessarily in profit) – it’s a pretty huge promotion for the forthcoming album (as good on online promotion as you’d ever hope for, really). It also comes at a point when the physical single is all but dying out; digital download sales are where it’s at and CD singles are becoming an ever rarer sight on the shelves – it’s pretty hard to sell something if it’s not in the shops.

The net result of this is that – other then maybe the top twenty – the singles chart is quickly sliding into irrelevance. You’ve really got to question why you would actually bother going to the effort of making a physical single, recording b-sides and promoting it when you can simply tell radio you’re releasing a digital single on xyz date; you don’t have to do a thing and you still get the valuable album promotion from radio plays.

The other interesting aspect of all of this is that they’re still going to sell the track as a more traditional single after they’ve stopped giving it away for free; it will be very interesting to see how well it does. When Radiohead released In Rainbows on iTunes I think a lot of people were surprised how well it sold, but the set of people that will download something for free off a (relatively) untrusted website is a very different set of people to the ones that normally buy off iTunes. It’s why all the talk about digital piracy harming sales is massively overstated – yes, you might have lost a small amount of sales but the people downloading things illegally weren’t going to pay for it in the first place.

Of course, it would have been a lot more interesting if the song was any good…

Have we got to a point where we’ve now pushed past our boundaries – in music specifically, but other art forms as well – leaving us with no ‘edge’ and nothing to push against?

We have progressed slowly but surely through the rise of popular music with more and more becoming acceptable. Rock and roll (a quaint term, now, isn’t it?) was once the causer of controversy – you shouldn’t listen to that – and now the very same musical style is about as staid and middle of the road as you can get.

Obviously this is just the march of an ever more liberal culture and society and specific examples will, when given 50 odd years to simmer, obviously loose their edge, but I think the real question is what edge do we have left? Racism – in its many forms – is the obvious example, but I think is hardly an edge worth pushing up against. It’s also an inverse of many of the other controversies – really the boundary that has been pushed against is people being racist (as opposed to pushing for being racist).

Offensive language is no longer an issue – yes, it’ll get bleeped/muted on the radio but it’s hardly controversial. Similarly, drug use is so well established it’s become a cliché; no one is going to care if you write a song about cocaine. And celibacy would probably probably be more shocking then sex.

I cannot think of any current musician that is actually genuinely controversial. It’s all been done.

What happens to music without its edge?