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...

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...