David Emery Online

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...