David Emery Online

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...

Indie Schmindie

I’ve been thinking about the concept of indie record labels all week after an article on the Guardian about everyone’s favourite currency-related rapper 50 Cent signing to “independent distributor Caroline”. Now for those that don’t keep up to speed with the coming and goings of the many, many major imprints Caroline is Universal’s entry into the much burgeoning “Label Services” sector (which it isn’t anything at all like Co-Op was previously so I don’t know why you’re thinking that), and offers a range of services from distribution to marketing to publicity and all the other things that a label does.

They’re a fine bunch of people and I’m sure they’ll do well, but does that sound anything like something you could call independent?

No I thought not.

Now this isn’t really the Guardian’s fault as looking around the same phrase is picked up elsewhere, so I imagine was on a press release. On reading it I was, as I’m sure you are now, apoplectic with rage (insert sarcasm emoji here) but it got me thinking – ok, they’re obviously not indie, but what exactly is the definition?

Wikipedia has a fairly reasonable definition:

An independent record label (or indie record label) is a record...

X Meets Y

I hate writing about music.

Chiefly I, myself, take great displeasure in writing about the stuff, but then also quite frankly – and with no disrespect to anyone reading who does write about it – I am no fan of any writing about music.

I mean, what is it good for?

Permit me to backtrack and clarify slightly; I do not mean any writing that has anything to do with music. Interviews: fine. Features: fine. News: fine. What raises my heckles is writing that is actually about the music itself.

If I never read about a “hypnotic baseline” or “x band meets y band” or “difficult second album syndrome” again it will be too soon. Can you remember the last time you read an album review that didn’t resort at some point to some formulaic cliche? And again: what is it good for? Gone are the days where to decide whether you wanted to buy a record you had to read a review and hope that the journalistic reinterpretation actually bore some relation to what the bloody thing sounded like.

Now: just listen to it. Decide for yourself.

Of course, you need a filter, and reviews still provide some vital sense of filtration, even if the...

Luck and Magic

Stats are dangerous.

You know how your parents would tell you off as a child if you tried to stick your fingers in a plug socket? Yeah, stats are like that.

There’s an obsession in certain parts of the music industry, particularly in digital marketing, with stats. Metrics. Percentage increases. Growth.

“Engagement”

Mostly this is like sticking a light bulb in your mouth, poking around the socket with a screwdriver and then flicking the “on” switch. You might think you’re going to get some illumination on the situation, but you really really don’t.

There are two key reasons why stats in the music industry are misleading to the point of self harm: luck and magic.

Firstly, then; luck. The tricky thing about how the whole music game works is that no one actually knows what they’re doing and why anything really happens. Sorry if this comes as a shock to anyone, I don’t mean it personally. It is true though. To break an artist there a million and one things that have to happen, most of which no one has any control over. You can certainly make it so those things don’t happen of course, and you can increase the chances that they do (a little),...

The Music Industry Didn't Die

I've been watching books.

Or rather, not.

For the last week or so on my daily zig-zag across the capital I've been trying to spot people reading books. I think for the purposes of informal but informative data collection I've got a good sample size, across morning commutes, day time train jaunts and late night bus rides. The full spectrum of people reading in public except, say, a lazy lunchtime spent underneath a tree disappearing. But close enough to do.

And how many books did I see?

One.

One lonely, battered copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on a dank and humid tube carriage. I suppose if you were to see a book in the wild there must be a not insignificant chance that it would be from J K Rowlings' repertoire.

One book then, but that's of course not to say that their weren't people _reading._ And in a multitude of different ways and forms. I was originally planning to count up all the assorted devices being used but I lost count, for shame, but the key word is "devices" - in this very modern tip-of-the-iceberg sample group, the book is dead. Not dying; done. The knife is firmly in the hand...

The Haircut

For men of a certain age, and with a certain quality of hair, there comes a time when going for a haircut takes on an additional level of seriousness.

You watch the barber intently. Look out for the “look”. The look that indicates precisely the same thing as that sharp intake of breath from a car mechanic: “I have news that you know is coming but you’re not going to like it”.

This time, maybe you’re fine.

You escape haircut intact, demeanour preserved. But you know one day, you’re going to get the look – or even make the look yourself for those of significant conviction – bite the bullet and accept that you have finally succumbed in the battle with your receding hairline.

It’s. All. Got. To. Go.

Your haircut is important, isn’t it? For something so easily changeable it becomes a persons signature, defining them in a multitude of differing ways. Even changes aid that definition; sticking with one style for a long time says as much about a person as changing it all the time. Conservative and comfortable, experimental and indecisive. Something in between.

For the record, this time: no look.

This is my last week working for Beggars Group.

It’s been...

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...