David Emery Online

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Boring.

The Internet is fatigued.

Or, to be more accurate and a little less snappy; people that work on the Internet are fatigued. Tired out. Bored.

We are in an interesting time when it comes to working in digital. Digital used to be an exciting wild west, where new completely revolutionary sites, apps and devices would materialise out of the either on an extremely regular basis. We used to be the trail blazers, getting glimpses into a future that was once the preserve of science fiction books and films.

I remember trying to explain Twitter to people when it first came out – why it was worth participating in – and it was practically impossible. It was a whole new concept, and that was exciting.

But now Twitter is 6 years old. It’s still just as interesting and useful a medium now – if not more so – then it was at the start, but it’s not exciting any more, is it? If you’re working in digital yes, advances in ad targeting, or photo previews in the timeline, or any of the other features Twitter have added recently might be useful to your job but they’re not going to get you out of bed in...

How To Sell Out

First things first: there is nothing wrong with making money from art.

I thought we should establish some ground rules before getting into it properly. To make sure we’re all on the same page. So, making money is cool, right? Without money, a significant amount of art would be impossible, with only rich trustafarians left to squeeze out deep and meaningful expressions of whatever their pricey education and expensive drugs have lead them to believe in.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. You just wouldn’t want only that, would you?

Money from art is ok, then, and I’d even be happy to extend that to making ‘lots’ of money being ok as well. Success is alright in my book, reaping the rewards of doing what you believe in doubly so and if you’d rather your favourite artist was a bit worse off so they were more ‘authentic’ then, well, fuck you quite frankly. I think it’s a fundamental misconception that wanting to be successful, being business minded and – for want of a better word – lusting after wealth is in somehow disingenuous with being an artist. The two things aren’t coupled together.

Or, at least, they don’t need to be.

There...