David Emery Online

A community isn’t a garden, it’s a bar.

I could have quoted all of this, it’s well worth a read.

It feels like we’re going through a few substantial shifts in technological thinking, all at once. For a long time it felt like we were coalescing around a few large, American, ad-supported social platforms. With the rise of TikTok and—to a much smaller extent—Mastodon, and the fall in Facebook and Twitter, that seems to be undoing.

At the same time, half of my social feed is screengabs of ChatGPT. A year ago it was all terrible mass produced art of bored monkeys, so I guess that’s progress. ChatGPT—or at least, its productionised successor—as a virtual barman for a social community? That’s an interesting thing to think about…

NYC

Replay ‘22

A good spread this year.

One of the things I like about Apple Music Replay is that it updates every week, all year round. Strongly suspect the latest Arctic Monkeys album might sneak in there before we hit December 31st.

Shame, Tamesis Dock

The Jurassic World Exhibition

There is an amazing weaponisation of consumer psychology at this end of this. You walk through room after room of dinosaur set pieces, each slowly ramping up in terms of scariness. Brachiosaurus first, velociraptor later, etc. Then, just at the point where your kids are getting a little tired after bouncing around petting anclyasauruses, in the last room—no spoilers—they terrify the pants off them.

And spit you out, tears akimbo, in an extremely well stocked gift shop.

Hyde Park, November 2022

So Much Wine by Phoebe Bridgers

Global warming is such that it’s likely that we’ll never get snow at Christmas in London again. I’m wearing a t-shirt right now and it’s late November.

But here we are, and this is another great addition to Phoebe Bridgers’ slowly completing Christmas album.

Everything old is new again

What I realise, now, about getting old is that it is possibly less about the old, and more about the getting.

To experience something is often the only way to truly understand it, and sometimes that just takes a while. Or it takes being in the correct place at the correct time. I was fortunate to have been an eager twentysomething around that social media took off, deeply invested in the possibilities and potential. I’ve been on Twitter for 16 years, as of this week, which is less time then the going rate for defrauding people out of billions of dollars.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and those that followed have not exactly lived up to the wide-eyed potential that I hoped they could fulfil, sacrificing so much at the gods of engagement and growth.

Back to base principles, then. There’s two sides to social media: connections, and content. Blogging was—and remains—bad at connections, but having your own home for “content”—writing, photos, links, not so much video—that is not at the whims of bankers and billionaires is feeling like it might be a good idea again.

So here we are. I’ve dusted off the design so it works for things that aren’t big long articles, and am typing in the compose box like it’s 2001.

For the “connections” bit Mastodon seems like it… might work? But we’ll see. Follow me if you’re on there, or just add this site to your RSS reader. Those things still exist, too.

Actual Life 3 (January 1 - September 9 2022) by Fred again..

It took a minute—and sometimes sounds a bit like Moby?—but I have got truly engrossed in this record. It’s the only thing holding back Taylor Swift from dominating my Replay 2022 mix…

The Fluid Passing of Time

My three-year-old has trouble with pronouns. The cat gets the worst of it. He will chase her around the house, picking her up whenever he has her outmanoeuvred, which is surprisingly often. She is very patient. A disgruntled meow is generally the worst he will get, whereas if the rest of us were to do the same blood would, no doubt, be shed.

“Could you put her down, please? I don’t think she likes it.”

Meow.

“He does like it daddy.”

Meow.

“I don’t think she does and also, she’s a she not a he.”

“No daddy, he’s a he.”

There’s a glint in his eye and a cheek in his grin that tells me that he is aware of his mistake, but is going to double down regardless. Everyone at the moment is a he. People, cats, dinosaurs, elephants; he is at least consistent. The reading I’ve done recently indicates that generation alpha is supposed to be more aware of gender identity, but I guess you can’t believe everything on the internet.

He is also workshopping a rather fluid understanding of the passage of time. Everything before today is yesterday. His birthday in January: Yesterday. The last time we saw Grandpa, which was about two weeks ago:...

Three Lessons

I have, like most vaguely sane people, a love/hate relationship with the idea of giving a talk. The “love” bit typically consists of everything after I come off stage without completely screwing it up. The “hate” makes up the rest of proceedings.

There’s a certain mist that descends about five minutes before hand that fogs the mind, dismantles your thought processes and dismembers your vocabulary. Preparation – extensive, or nonexistent – seems to bear no relation to this process. It is as if your brain is trying to distance itself from your mouth and body, lest they do anything too embarrassing.

For me, this mist reaches its peak “can’t even see the front of the car, we’re going to have to pull over” intensity exactly 10 seconds after I’ve started speaking. It’s at that point where, having managed to actually say something, I start thinking about the fact that I’ve actually managed to say something and then completely forget what I was going to say next.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I gave a talk.

The brief was good – 10 minutes on “What I Learned From…” a specific campaign I’d worked on recently, so I – foolishly, see above – said yes....

Fake Hits

I remember having a conversation with a manager a few years back. It wasn’t an easy meeting. Throughout he was leaning forward in his seat, rocking slightly back and forth, his dissatisfaction with the situation physically manifesting with every sentence.

We’d already talked about the problem at length, tried several different ways to try and change it, but still it remained and here we were. By this point he was not the only person in the room on edge.

“So explain this again,” his voice was raised, but not yet shouting “how we can be getting so many plays on SoundCloud, but we can only sell a handful of records?”

It was a fair question.

***

One of the internet’s core strengths is its ability to create communities on a scale that were never possible before. People from around the world can loosely group together around a topic remarkably easily. What used to be a niche interest can suddenly be shared with millions of other people.

This has obviously had something of an impact on the music industry.

You could make a strong argument that Napster was the first music social network. Disparate music fans around the world connected together and shared what they loved. And...

Transitions

When I started my career in music I worked in what was then known as the New Media department. “This new internet malarkey” we collectively thought “is probably something we should pay attention to. Let’s separate out the people that seem to understand what it is hope they don’t cause too much fuss.”

This was a while ago now. The iTunes Store was but a year old in the UK. YouTube didn’t exist yet. If you wanted to watch a music video your best bet was to wait for it to come on MTV. Your other option was to watch a postage-stamp-sized, sub-VHS quality Windows Media or Real Player streaming link.

All of the talk then – at least in the New Media Department – was of the digital transition. At this point this referred to the transition to legal digital downloads from CDs and Napster. It was a format shift. Vinyl to cassettes to CDs to downloads. The concept was the same as it ever had been – buying music. And the overriding thought was that if the industry can make digital download sales work, and litigate like crazy, then the Napster problem would go away.

In hindsight, it’s pretty...

Music Stories

Last week a new band came in to play us their freshly delivered debut album. There is protocol in these situations. Everyone must sit in rapturous contemplation and laser focused attention. Heads must bob. Feet must tap. After every track you must make some gesture that indicates that, yes, that track was good; a smile, a nod, maybe even a quick, muttered “Great”.

Mid way through the second track, one of them gets up, stretches over to the stereo and turns the volume up.

“So, what did you think?”

The one universal constant shared by all the artists I have come across is the wash of nervousness that descends upon them in the split second of silence that follows that question.

Fortunately the room agrees that it is a great piece of work, and even more fortunately they’re not just saying it to avoid an awkward situation (and potential job loss). In the conversation that follows the band go into the ideas behind the record, the context, and also how much time they spent getting the track listing just so. You can hear it, as well; listening from start to finish the album ebbs and flows, building up tension and weight, only to release...

How to Survive 2017

Let’s take stock, shall we? By all accounts, the world has gone crazy. Not as bad as when it’s been really bad, but, you know, bad. Facts are dead. It is entirely possible that some people genuinely think up is actually down, and to say anything different is unpatriotic. In an effort to prove that politics is just as cyclical as fashion, by different turns we seem to be simultaneously reviving the Nazis and the Cold War. We are metaphorically wearing a Hugo Boss suit with leg warmers, and look just as stupid.

Let’s put all that to one side though. It is, I think we can all agree, too much. But what I want to write about is how to best handle the year ahead, and to ignore the looming doom of the modern political landscape would be remiss. The elephant is there; let’s all look at it, puzzle for a second at quite what it’s done with its hair, and move on.

After all, we have records to sell.

Of course, I don’t just mean records. And of course – of course! – I don’t mean sell. Such simplicities are the luxury of a different time. I have written at length...

Storytelling

I was talking recently with someone I know who works at a music media company. I say “media company” both to be purposefully vague but also because I struggle to think of a better term that encompasses the merging worlds of distribution, retail and promotion.

Day in, day out, they get pitched music.

They told me that the latest thing that record labels are talking about is “storytelling”.

This makes a lot of sense, because labels have always been natural storytellers. The original story was that if you wanted to get your music into shops, into the hands of the public, you had to sign a record deal. It was a good story, a true story, and I think we can all agree that the labels did pretty well out of telling that tale.

Fast forward several decades, and the story started to change a little. The details adapted – like a shocking, unbelievable-because-it’s-made-up story you see flash past on Facebook every 3 years – but the underlying message is the same. Rather than “we’re the only ones that can get you in to stores”, as distribution got easier the story became “we’re the only way you can have a hit”.

When you get wined...

High Wire

Releasing music is getting complicated, isn’t it? Once, you’d simply use huge factories dotted around the world to etch your record onto a small plastic disc, then use fleets of planes, trains and automobiles to get them into thousands of stores dotted around high streets hither and thither.

Now you just release it digitally with one retailer and go to number one in multiple markets with no traditional promotion. And it’s all just so complicated.

Now obviously, obviously, the Frank Ocean’s of this world aren’t and can’t be a blueprint for everyone else, for exactly the same reason that Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want scheme wasn’t something that any old band could make work (homework assignment: 1500 words on how In Rainbows was the first significant windowed exclusive release). And I’m not saying the release of Blonde was perfect. But I think the current crop of exclusive and windowed releases are a manifestation of some significant industry shifts.

The iTunes Store launched just over 13 years ago, and it’s taken that long for digital music to actually change how people release albums (it did the job with singles a fair while back, mind). It seems crazy to say, but while in certain markets (most certainly not...

Bubble

I have two main ways of getting to work. One way – my normal way – involves a slightly soulless walk, slightly mediocre coffee, and a slightly less crowded tube train at the end of it. The other way features rammed carriages but significantly better flat whites.

I was in the later establishment just over a week ago. It was a Friday. One of the more characterful features of the place is that it typically plays loud, high BPM music more frequently found in places like, I don’t know, Fabric I guess? I don’t really go to clubs any more, but this is the sort of music I assume they still play.

In short, it is not the sort of accompaniment you expect with your morning coffee. Once I was in there and they were playing – at their traditional ear splitting volume – The Teaches of Peaches (by Peaches). Watching the ripple of confusion spread through the queue as people figured out that yes, they had heard that lyric correctly, was quite a beautiful sight to behold.

Back to that Friday. There was no music playing, and a glum look across the faces of all the staff. You can probably guess...

You Used To Call Me On My Cellphone

My first MP3 player was this terrible, brick-like contraption made by Nokia. I couldn’t afford a regular player, so to take part in the nascent digital music revolution I was forced to get something on a phone contract that also happened to play MP3s. I paid a big price, not just in terms of the student-loan depleting monthly payments, as the phone I got was designed at the peak of Nokia’s “creative” phase, where they rigorously tested all the different possible permutations of what a phone should look like. For better and, far more frequently, for worse.

I can picture the design meeting. It is somewhere deep in the frozen north of Finland. A gaggle of designers, sipping strong, black coffee to keep them alert from the never ending snowy darkness outside, assemble in a pristine conference room.

“I have got it!” one of them says – he is excited, although you could never tell from the monotone of his voice.

“The kids that we want to buy the new MP3 player phone,” he continues “they like to send the text messages.”

“So, how about we give this phone a full keyboard, so they can send them even quicker?”

“But,” another of the designers interjects,...

I Want My MTV

You’ve watched Making A Murderer, haven’t you? And of course when I say watched I really mean binged, episode after episode flickering past in a haze of instant entertainment addiction. If you haven’t watched that show, you will almost certainly be familiar with the experience.

Making A Murderer – and its widespread reception – indicates we have hit a tipping point where streaming, subscription-based video is truly mainstream. Not that it hasn’t been popular previously – the likes of House of Cards, Breaking Bad, Orange is the New Black all attest to that – but it is now accepted – the fact that a series like this appeared, Beyoncé-esq, on Netflix with little or no fanfare and his hit mass acclaim is not news. It’s normal. And that’s interesting.

Not only was the distribution channel through a per-month-based app, but they made – or at least financed – it as well. That’s pretty interesting as well. In fact, it’s all far too interesting for the music industry just to sit and watch happen without thinking “maybe we should do that”, as it is wont to do whenever a similar industry is doing well. I mean, if you squint enough TV is pretty...