David Emery Online

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,...

Balance

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...

Sex, data and rock and roll

It’s not all sex, drugs and rock and roll this music lark, you know. I’m not sure exactly which of those it replaces - pessimistically probably both the first two - but if you’re talking music in 2014 there’s also data to think about as well.

I’m typically not fond of all the floods of data and analytics that some sections of the industry seem utterly obsessed by, as they can take over your life such is the depth that most tools offer. What I do like however are simple tools that tell you useful things.

A couple of years ago I hacked together something along those lines (simple more due to my limitations more so than anything else…) that checked the iTunes UK chart and pinged me an email anytime one of the releases I was working on moved up or down the charts. It made a brief appearance in this post about the Mercury Prize as well, and has altogether been quite handy over the years.

Now, when you make something that checks the iTunes albums chart every 30 minutes and leave it running for two years you end up with a lot of data. Like, 700mb of data. I...

Different Slices Of Sky

So, in shock news it turns out the album is going extinct.

That’s a shame isn’t it?

I’m not what the exact protocol is in this sort of situation; do we need to start a kickstarter or something? I mean, there’s quite a few albums I was looking forward to. Why isn’t someone doing something? Won’t someone think of the children?

Etc etc.

It’s no surprise, of course, that George Ergatoudis, the Head of Music for Radio 1 doesn’t believe in the relevance of the album format and sees playlists taking over. He’s in charge of a station that has a whole industry – an army – of pluggers specifically pushing single tracks at them day in, day out in the hope that they get added to… a playlist. The emergent popularity of streaming services from a radio station controllers point of view is simply realigning the recorded music industry to fit with how they see the world already.

Let’s not dismiss the concept straight out of hand, however. There is a fascinating flourishing growth in the significance of popular playlists on Spotify, each having the ability to significantly drive exposure (and hence cash cash money in the form of streaming revenue, although still...

Scratching The Itch

I don’t think there are many people that know that once, what seems like an age ago, I did a computer science degree. At that point in time I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to get into music – my teenage band failing dismally to even get to the giging stage, the music website I ran faring similarly (un)successful – and so I focused instead on an industry that seemed to be more achievable: video games.

Video games you could study to get into, rather then the magic that seemed to be required to get into music. I knew about computers, I had a basic grasp of a smidgen of programming so I signed up to do a computer science degree with the idea that at the end of it I could get a job for a games company. Now, I didn’t actually want to program games, I really wanted to design them, but programming seemed like a good first step even if I didn’t really enjoy doing it.

Three years of C++, Java, SQL and other such thrilling and exciting topics later and I landed on my feet and lucked out with pretty much the perfect...