David Emery Online

The music industry doesn't need solving

Last week I got in an argument on the Internet.

I know, I know; I should know better.

It was an argument born out of frustration. To summarise: Amanda Palmer, who I imagine most of you have heard of but if you haven’t is a musician of some note and has had great and widely reported success with crowdfunding, wrote a public letter to Morrissey about how he should crowdfund his next record. This letter, entirely unsurprisingly, is full of exaggerations and faulty logic to make crowdfunding seem like the only viable option.

Hence, of course, my frustration. Picture, if you will, someone intently reading on a laptop, the glow of the screen illuminating their lips as every few moments either a disgruntled gasp or a muttered swear word escapes them.

My frustration with this particular article is not actually the point of this piece – I’ll get to that in a minute – but revolves around the notion that anyone can just put something on Kickstarter, tweet about it and as if by magic watch the money roll in, all the while tittering gleefully to themselves about how record labels and shops are dinosaurs and how this is the true future...

Arts

Permit me, if you will, to wonder out loud for a moment.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the “arts” and how they intersect, join and influence each other. Music and films and art and theatre and videogames. Videogames are probably the easiest to isolate and look at the influences; as a young industry they’ve cribbed their ideas and concepts from what’s pre-existed, most obviously from movies.

Compare not only the release of a big franchise game like Grand Theft Auto to that of, say, a new Tarrentino flick – with the vast marketing campaign, launch events née premieres, reviews, et cetera – but also the content itself, overflowing with cut scenes, known actors voicing key roles, and story lines half-inched from things you’ve watched before. Not to say this is a bad form of entertainment, of course, but it’s doesn’t major well for new experiences.

A good argument could be made that maybe now, with the rise of the burgeoning indie game scene and the popularity of platforms such as the App Store with their low barriers to entry, we are starting to see the games industry find its true feet and step out from the shadow of mediums that have...

Singles are dead

Singles are dead.

Long live tracks.

Earlier today on Twitter there was a discussion going round centring on how difficult it is to find out when a singles’ release date is. And whilst a “discussion on Twitter” isn’t normally the best foundation for, well, anything it reminded me about something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now but never gotten around to it. Namely that singles, as most people think of them at least, don’t really exist any more (or at the very least are on their deathbed).

Think about it for a second – if a track gets stuck up on YouTube, is that automatically a single? Probably not, right? Ok, how about if it’s put up for sale on iTunes at the same time? That’s a cautious “yes”, that’s a single, but then that swiftly turns into a “ah, probably not” if it turns out that track isn’t being taken to radio. Confusing, isn’t it?

Online the concept of singles really has no meaning. If a song is online – and when I say online I mean streaming or available for download somewhere – then it is “out”. If you have to prescribe a release date to a track...

Excitement about excitement

“BOWIE!”

“Bowieeeee!!!!”

“BOWIEOMG”

“Bowie isn’t dead!”

“BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWIE! BOWIEBOWIEBOWIEBOWIEBOWIEBOWIE! hyperventilates BOWIE! #Bowie”

All these tweets were posted within about 20 minutes of each other yesterday morning.

They simultaneously represent the best and worst of twitter.

Twitter is probably the best tool for breaking news you could think of. I remember in the weeks that followed the 7/7 London bombing when everything felt dangerous, strange and on edge pondering about the idea of a “breaking news” notification system that could pop up something on your computer if something important happened. Now we have that, but not just for what’s important to the world in general, but what’s important to you – a hand picked, curated importance. If something of interest happens and I’m near an open twitter client I’ll know what’s happened within minutes (if not seconds).

Same goes for when a funny picture of a cat get’s uploaded somewhere, but that’s my point – it’s curated.

But whilst we’ve gained something have we lost something as well?

In the speed to report events, there’s no time for opinion, no time for accuracy, no time for anything but “this happened!”. Frothy excitement, with no substance. All bubbles.

Maybe this is fine. The first wave of froth hits the...

2012 In Music

Welcome one and all to my annual run down of this years music. Well, I say “this” years, but it’s actually last years now but you know what I mean, right?

So, what did [this/last] years music have for us? As seems to be the trend of recent years, a distinct lack of amazing albums to be perfectly honest – sure, I could collate 20 or so into a list but only a couple are good pieces of work from start to finish so it seems like an exercise in futility.

That plus I’m lazy.

Mostly the futility thing, though.

BUT! That’s not to say there hasn’t been lots of good music put out in 2012. Oh no. There are good tracks by the bucket load (playlist load?), and it seems to me that in this day and age counting down anything other then tracks at the end of the year would be foolish – albums only wouldn’t represent half of the good music put out.

And weirdly a lot of that good music is what you might refer to as “pop music”, or at least heavily influenced by the aforementioned pop, but there’s nothing wrong with that now, is there?

Anyway. BRING ON...

The Mercury Effect (winners edition)

My previous post tracking the iTunes chart placings of the Mercury nominated artists seemed to go down pretty well. And now – as I’m sure anyone reading this knows already – we know that Alt J were the deserving winners.

So, how does winning effect your iTunes chart placing? This is all about cold, hard, sales – right?

If you go back and look at the graph on my previous post, it’s getting a bit… messy. Quite pretty, but pretty eligible. So, for your curious enjoyment, here’s just Alt J’s graph, starting yesterday morning, so it’s easy to see what effect it has (at the time of writing they’re at #2 so that’s not a bad start…):

The xx at Bridlington Spa

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The Mercury Effect

A little later then normal we are finally in that yearly UK music industry shit storm that is the Mercury Prize. As per normal the list is “uninspiring” and “does it really represent the best of UK music this year” and “why wasn’t [obscure eletro/metal/folk artist] nominated?!?”.

Side note – it’s entirely possible I follow too many music journalists on Twitter.

For the record there’s a couple of artists on the list that I wouldn’t mind winning, but it doesn’t seem like the most interesting selection of music I’ve ever seen. Nothing that grabs me, or moves music forward in a significant way.

But the music is irrelevant really, isn’t it? What we really want are graphs!

One of the key reasons why anyone actually cares about the Mercury prize is that it has a direct effect on sales of the nominated and winning records. It’s a bit of a circular situation – the industry cares because it increases sales, and it increases sales because the industry cares. And everyone sits there hoping that every year the house of cards stays intact (which it seems to, even when they get it a bit wrong *cough* Speech Debelle).

What I was wondering is what exactly does...

Bloc Party Rehearsal at the Forum

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Purity Ring at White Heat

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