David Emery OnlineBalance
29 September 2014
Picture the scene: I’m at a dinner party (I don’t really go to dinner parties, but let’s ignore that). There’s a lull in the natural flow of the conversation; a silence creeps across the table.
“So what do you do again?”
I reply with my standard response of working for a record label, listing off a reel of artists until I hit upon one that seems to flicker some note of recognition.
“Oh, a record label, eh? That’s all going down the toilet isn’t it? No one buys records any more do they. What you going to do when it all goes under?”
“Well, actually it’s actually nowhere near as bad as that, in fact we’re doing pretty well…”
Cutting me off (this fictional dinner party guest is a bit of a dick, isn’t he?), he continues: “The problem is, you see, is that the music biz (sic) is just too slow to embrace things – first Napster, now things like Spotify. You’re all still just trying to flog CDs!”
To which I jump over the table and punch him in the face (side note: don’t invite me to dinner parties).
End scene
Other then that last bit, this is a pretty accurate representation of a conversation I – and no doubt most working in the industry – have had numerous times, the general thrust of which is “why doesn’t the music industry embrace new stuff more quickly?”. The answer is, of course “it’s complicated”, but the bit I’d like to focus on is that of balance.
Every record release is made up of a million different entities, all balanced off against each other in (hopefully) the most optimum way. For example, say you’ve got a new song to premiere. Do you premiere with Radio 1, but maybe not on the show that you want (as they’re not supporting you quite yet), do you premiere with 6music on a show that loves you but with less listeners then the R1 show, or do you do a big online premiere that rules out the radio options but gives you more control and maybe more global impact? There’s not necessarily a right answer, but you better believe that you could easily end up pissing off either Radio 1 or 6music depending on what way you pick.
The same sort of choices are true of almost every facet of release a record, and that really comes in play if you want to think about trying something new – by experimenting with something different and interesting, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to rise eire from whatever traditional bit of the industry that you might be disrupting. And that’s fine, but sadly – unless you’re Beyoncé – you almost certainly still need that traditional bit of industry.
Last week was the perfect illustration of the way this goes down. Alt-J released their new album “This Is All Yours” to much fanfare – so much so that it went in at number 1 yesterday in the album charts. But if you looked on the iTunes Store, the biggest single retailer in the UK for music, you wouldn’t have seen one thing about it (other then in the charts, of course).
Why? Because the week before it was out Alt-J did an exclusive album stream with Spotify.
iTunes obviously feels the pressure from Spotify, and isn’t going to let it stand if you give something exclusive to them. The thing to weigh up, then, is do the streams generated from being on Spotify a week early (and the promo you get from them for doing that) outweigh the sales you’d generate from being on the homepage of the iTunes Store? Personally, I think you wouldn’t even come close, but it’s almost academic – either way, you’re losing something quite tangible.
To be clear – I don’t blame iTunes here; business is business. But it just illustrates the key challenge of trying out new things: not only do you have to come up with something interesting, exciting and innovative – you have to make sure it doesn’t piss off someone in the process.