David Emery Online

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...

Music in 2030

Flying cars, hoverboards, and self-drying jackets — predicting the future is hard.

However, if we’re just to focus on music right now, it’s a fascinating time. Certain things are falling into place, which means that the path is maybe—just maybe—becoming clearer for the minute. At least, that is, in terms of how technology is influencing the way people listen to music.

We are obviously at a point now where legal, on-demand access to almost all music is a reality—whether through streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music, or YouTube (which we might want to count as a streaming service as well, though I don’t think anyone actually uses it in quite the same fashion). In some ways, streaming is still a comparatively niche business, but from where I’m sitting—as someone working in the music industry—at some point in the last 12 months it went from an underground niche to an overground one.

It is now inevitable that streaming music will become the most popular way to listen. It won’t be the only way, of course, but it will certainly account for the majority—in the same way the CD once did.

But what effect will that have? To get an idea, we should...

What We Can Learn

It’s about 7pm on a dark November Friday. The weather has turned from unseasonably warm to appropriately bitter. That hasn’t stopped the shoppers flocking to one of the capitals premiere shopping destinations, however. They mill around, bags in tow, flicking Christmas signs lighting up their work-weary faces.

In HMV there is a queue at the checkout. I am one of five; the three people ahead are all clutching CDs marked 25. So is the man behind me. So am I.

So much has already been written about the new Adele record, and far more will be because it is fascinating. It’s fascinating because the story of her, and the story of her success, runs counter to so many different narrative strands that we are all deeply accustomed and attuned to.

For example:

The recorded music industry is dying

Well, we’re all used to hearing this one, right? Even now, if you tell a new acquaintance down the pub that you work for a record label you get roughly the same response I did when I took my old car to webuyanycar.com – a slow exhale of breath through pierced lips, and a slight shake of the head (”…and how long did you say the...

Drive

If you work in the UK music industry, 2015 is probably proving to be quite a confusing year. Several elements that have been brewing for a while have now all snapped into relevance, turning everything upside down in the process.

For example, exactly how should you release a single now?

(No, go on – I’d like an actual answer if you’ve got one.)

Now, streams being added to the single chart happened last year, but it took a good 6 months for everyone to start paying attention, and then another 6 months for the majors to stick their flag firmly in the ground marked “on air on sale” and make it properly mean something. Or should that be “on air on stream”? Or maybe not? And just how long is a cycle at radio now? It seems to be simultaneously getting both shorter (in terms of on-the-playlist time before your impact date) and longer (if you have a track that beds in regionally).

Questions, questions, questions.

Let’s not even get started on the impact streams are having to the albums chart, and whether that makes any sense at all, because the charts are a weird place anyway ever since we all decided to up sticks...

Freaks and Weirdos

When I was at school you could roughly divide people into three different camps: firstly, most obviously, you had the cool kids. If, in another life, I had gone to class in Northern California I guess I would have called them jocks. You know the type.

At the other end of the spectrum – and classroom, frequently – you had the geeks. My school was a grammar school – you had to pass an entrance exam to get in. We had a lot of geeks.

In between is the interesting bit. These are the people that didn’t fit. Not athletic enough, or outgoing enough, or “normal” enough to be top tier, but also not book-smart enough, or obsessive enough, or “weird” enough to mingle with the geeks. They would flit between both tribes, never quite settling in either. The freaks and the weirdos, in the best way.

In my experience the music industry is overwhelmingly made up of people from that third group. And that, at least maybe a little bit, I think might be why sometimes it makes collective decisions that just don’t make much sense.

Considering that music is a cultural art form – that resonates deep within people, in their very...

Amateur Hour

The other week I had lunch with a friend – the sort of lazy, Saturday-with-no-real-plans kind of lunch where you’re there so long one meal time merges into the next – and during our tenure a friend of his joined us. Let’s call this friend “Jack”. Jack identifies himself as a Youtuber.

For those of you who haven’t heard this modern Internet colloquialism, in essence a Youtuber is simply someone that runs a successful YouTube channel. They typically follow the form of a lone, bubbly presenter doing bits to camera about, well, anything really – from fashion to beauty to games to comedy (although interestingly rarely music, although bedroom covers artists are inexplicably popular as well). Youtubers are the inevitable result of a wildly successful video platform that allows anyone to upload videos themselves and build up a following – they are the internet’s native TV presenters. This is not some little niche either – popular Youtubers get viewing figures that can easily outstrip traditional terrestrial broadcasts, and boast subscribers in the millions.

It is a fascinating area, because as with so many technology-led movements it is fundamentally something different – the democratic nature of the Internet is allowing a whole new...

Do you really mean it?

Frank Carter stands on the bar at the back of the room. With one hand he steadies himself against the low roof, with the other he clutches the microphone, the wire winding its way over the top of the audience, back to the stage. The atmosphere is akin to what would happen if you shut the door to your kitchen and left a pan of salty water to boil until it burnt.

“I had a really hard year” he says.

“Within the space of about a month, both me and my girlfriend lost our jobs. Then we found out we were expecting our baby.”

“And then we lost someone.”

“I didn’t know how to process all this, what to do with myself, so I started writing again. Every day, words and sentences, until they started resembling songs. I called up my friend Dean over there” – he gestures over to the guitarist – “and we started meeting every Wednesday.”

“First we had 3 songs. Then in a month we had 18. This is one of them; it’s about what happens when you lose someone.”

He and his band then launch into something loud, emotional but above all authentic. You can tell that he means every word,...

Hype Cycles

“If you start to feel sick just take it off and you’ll be fine in a minute.”

These words – uttered by the person operating a computer, oversized goggles and corresponding tangle of wires – are just one of the many reasons why the latest wave of virtual reality is, with depressing inevitability, destined for failure.

If you haven’t used an Oculus Rift, or one of its many similar competitors , it’s a surprisingly unimpressive experience for something with so much hype. The screen is quite low resolution – you can easily see the pixels – and the experience is never that convincing. You are never going to be fooled into thinking you’re somewhere else – in fact, it’s remarkably similar to the initial wave of VR back in the 90s.

The technology is bound to get better – it always does – but the real problem with VR is simple: it’s utterly antisocial. While you are using one, you are blotting out the world and everyone else within it. Someone this week told me that Oculus’s plan was to get them in every living room by Christmas, at a mass market price point, but just think about that for a second: the...

Quick! Let's release a record!

I am sitting in a small cafe in southern Alabama. The south’s reputation for friendliness is proving well founded, and quickly the barista has coaxed a significant amount of my life story out of me; probably more then I’ve told several people I would consider friends back in London. It’s quite disarming. It turns out that this place actually used to be a record store – there are gig posters littering the wood panel walls – but slowly more people started buying coffee and less people were buying records.

I’m sure this story had happened in more then a few places.

I mention that I work in music and the conversation turns to the new Bjork album, and how it leaked and the subsequent panic release. “How were we supposed to run a record store if people can download it weeks before we can sell it?” It’s a fair point, although not a new one.

The Bjork release seems worth highlighting but not dwelling on too much. For a large number of reasons, releasing it on iTunes over a month before the already announced full release because of a leak is a crazy thing to do. For a start, leaks don’t matter. They...

Don't try this in Los Angeles

It’s well known that LA is a car town, but it doesn’t really hit you quite what that means until you get there. To someone from Europe well versed in how cities can sprawl – or not – you think “sure, everyone drives in LA, I get it”. But you really don’t. It’s woven so deep into the very fibre of the place’s being, into its soul, that it creeps into everything and everyone.

When I first go to a city I normally try and walk to as many places as I can to try and figure out what makes this place tick; what makes this place different from anywhere else. You can’t do that out the window of a fast moving taxi cab. You miss things, intangibles. New York: the noise. London: old and new, poor and rich, all next to each other. Paris: (to be clichéd, because sometimes clichés are well observed) the attitude.

Don’t try this in Los Angeles.

The first time I went there I did, and what looked on the map to be a 30 minute walk turned out to be a 45 minute walk past street after street of low-rise, widely spaced houses punctuated by never ending...

Disconnected

As I write it is 9pm the night before the first day of school.

It's sort of fascinating how that feeling that was drilled into you as a child lingers on well into adulthood, isn't it? I have a good, fun job that I enjoy immensely but yet here I am, the last weekend at the bloated end of the Christmas break full of the creeping dread.

Hopefully I haven't forgotten my maths homework.

Maybe this dread, this mild sense of malaise, is because the December break is so vital, especially if you work in the creative industries, and especially if you do it right. Now when I say "right" I don't mean fleeing the country for a blast of sun like a migrating bird making full use of the fact it has wings (or saved up air miles), or sloping home to your parents to remind yourself what being a teenager was like (but with a real ID rather then a fake one that said you were actually Canadian).

No, what I mean by doing it right is to disconnect. Turn off your email. Don't "check in". Don't put an out of office on that says "I'm on holiday but checking my...

Same As It Ever Was

I am on a bus. The air is clammy. Condensation drips down the windows. Directly in front of me two teenagers are watching a video on an oversized smartphone. The volume is loud – no headphones involved, obviously – and the track is terrible (it’ll probably place highly in the singles chart in the not too distant future). Across the aisle a man scowls in their general direction.

To my right is a girl far more sensitive to bus etiquette who has her headphones in, watching what appears to be the new Take That video. Judging by her face, she misses Jason too. Four seats forward is another pair of teenagers, girls, one headphone each watching something unidentifiable. Whatever it is, they seem to like it.

YouTube is everywhere.

More than potentially any other service, it has managed to become ubiquitous, used by the young and old, across varying demographics and classes. To wit; you could quite happily mangle the Warhol quote about everyone from the President to Liz Taylor to a bum on a street corner drinking Coke to refer to YouTube.

There are whole businesses and industries built on top of YouTube. They have their own lingo, acronyms, conferences. MCNs, ContentID,...