Great new video from Dan Bull ‘Home Taping is Killing Music’.

BTW the subject line comes from this graphic which I did for a Second Life t-shirt or an LJ avatar 3 years ago originally, it seems to have spread *ahem Jeb* so here you can have it at higher res

Been thinking about posting an article about Music Marketing 101 for ages, in two minds to post it. For one, marketing and advertising as Hicks said IS the devils work – and I should know I work in this world. Why should I help Satan’s Little Helpers?

The other is that as someone who hasn’t marketed his own music is liable to get people saying ‘but you haven’t been at the coalface’ which I accept. I have though been promoting my own stuff (events, podcast, mashups, talents) online for years and been heavily involved with social media, and have been a rabid music fan since 7 years old.

The reason I am posting is the whining from record labels, industry staff, PR people etc. that music doesn’t sell, traditional formats don’t sell, it’s all going to hell in a handbasket – and this is used as a reason to clamp down on ‘illegal’ practices like sharing and mashups and the like. This pisses me off, as I can see most of ‘em are severely missing a trick with social media and interactive media, and blatantly not doing their job and blaming their ineptitude on others (talking mostly corporates here, although I think indies could also learn a little). So if the Lamb lies down with the Beast and listens to it’s iPod for a while, so be it.

So this is an open letter to the music industry managers and marketers and such bods. Doubt they are listening, and some of it seems obvious but is well worth restating, but anyway here goes:

1. Time of the season

In this age of 24 Hour news and ecommerce, why does it take 3-6 months to release a track or album? OK I know lead times for traditional press and getting a physical product out there are immovable (something like 6 weeks for magazines, and dunno about CDs/vinyl now but guessing 1-2 months or more depending on artwork/specialties), but when you’ve got iTunes and digital releases there’s no reason to create all that buzz for a track you cannot even get or legally download…this feeds Hype Machine and music blogs such delays – as the longer the delay, the more likely the fans will get bored of the track or go find it illegally. Why not have the track/album available digitally immediately? Why tease for months, this is the old way of thinking – we want stuff we can listen/share NOW.

2. Oh so special

‘Physical formats don’t sell’. BULL. SHIT. I’ve bought physical formats recently, special imports I’ve hurried to buy and awaited eagerly for the postie to deliver. Now I admit amongst a younger age group the physical CD holds less sway, but 30+ age bracket still prefers it…and those CDs I bought? Special limited editions – one was a CD of an album I already had on MP3 but with a hand-sprayed 7″ collectable – the handmade part is important. Make your releases special in this age of digital cloned conformity, make them artworks, make them unique, handmade, craft objects. Limited edition and special – totally the way to go. I thought the music industry KNEW this? Seemingly not in most cases. Create a boring physical product that conforms and looks like everyone else’s CDs and guess what? No-one will care much for it. Artists know this (both visual and musical) – listen to them.
And even the MP3s can be made distinct and have thoughtful nice touches – one of the things I loved about NIN’s free Ghosts LP is Trent commissioned a unique graphic for each MP3 of the album from an artist. That is cool.

3. Live n’ direct

Buying direct from the artist gives a warm, fuzzy feeling…there is NO reason why artists can’t sell direct in this age, and it’s a major plus. All fans would rather give their money to the band/artist they love rather than some spotty chimp who just put the CD in a rack and doesn’t really care if it’s The XX or Michael Buble in the box. NIN knows this, St Etienne knows this, Shut Up and Dance knows this, even Radiohead did this once before wimping out. No reason why unestablished acts can’t do it either.

4. Everybody wants a piece of the action

In this Web 2.0/Social media world it amazes me that media companies still tell people to want a passive experience. Or give them a token interaction (no, texting inane comments or competitions or a token remix competition for a record voucher does not cut it anymore). Talking about DJ Hero recently on GYBO reminded me of this – Activision and Freestyle missed a trick there, they could have used their deep pockets to license and involve the DJ/mashup community by licensing existing popular mashups for the game or releasing some of the parts into the wild and including those as downloadable content for the game with credit to the mashers – who of course will be so pleased with the attention they will promo the game for free. Or doing what Frets on Fire is doing and allow people to create their own levels, and share them (even without the tracks if that was a problem, but just instructions for which track/album to use).

The top-down idea of entertainment is so 20th century, and is changing. So do what Lily Allen did and include your album parts on your album (and thus had loads of free advertising in mashups everywhere), make your videos remixable (how I go through hell to find high quality vids for my mashes) or create forums for people to remix your work as NIN has – and then don’t sue/threaten them if they use the work in unexpected ways, because that will happen, but will probably be to everyone’s benefit.

5. Everybody’s free (to feel good)

Free is not evil – free is good. Singles do not sell in the main unless you are Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber or some such crap – so why not give them away for free to promote the album? Or at least don’t snap at the blogs posting MP3s giving you free publicity – they are music fans too and would most likely want to see the album and band/artist do really well – especially if they are actually posting tracks with permission! Also pay what you want seems to work well, like the direct model (or in tandem) people want to see the artist do well – what they hate is the money going up exec’s noses or for people who add very little to the chain – they are not stupid, the excess and waste (and high CD prices) of the industry hasn’t gone unnoticed. Neither has the money thrown at frankly terrible projects and bands that anyone with sense, an ear and not directly related to them would’ve not given the time of day.

Oh and Creative Commons is your friend.

6. Release Me (and Let Me Love Again)

Following from the last point is the hardest part – releasing something good. Now I’m not going to fall into the old fogey trap and say pop music is crap today (it was ever thus, sadly – with some notable and honourable exceptions) but producing music that people care about, rather than something for ringtone or advertising sales, pays dividends. Treat all music as throwaway and guess what: your audience will do likewise. This doesn’t mean serious singer-songwriter bores need to rise apparent but meaning in music has been lost somewhere in between all the branding meetings; lack of risk taking and the one-album syndrome mean artists never develop beyond the surface; concentrating on one niche ADHD demographic will not only lose everyone else, it will probably lose that too because ‘giving people what they want’ only works so far until those people get bored and listless – people don’t KNOW what they want until they hear it. The shock of the new, and all that.

Sticking with what they know and a tried and tested formula is short-sighted and just leads to disinterest and apathy. Try behaving more like a mashup artist – mix up the genres, fuck it up, put the country next to rave next to electro next to death metal and see what happens. Feed stuff to the ‘wrong’ audience and see what happens. I just know people will love and buy music that moves them, you just have to surprise, shock, woo, involve and connect with them, resonate with them. I think a lot of that is to break down the walls between artist and audience – Twitter is already doing this in it’s inane way – and take out the marketing bumpf and production fluff, which adds nothing.

I hope these comments come of use to provoke a few thoughts…it does seem from the outside the creativity and innovation in promoting bands is lacking – especially in the realm of social media, bar a few key people who indeed ‘get it’. A lot of this is corporates acting as corporates do – and still not heeding Cluetrain Manifesto that came out over 10 years ago – the principles of transparency and letting people get direct access to those people they need to talk to and not letting bland marketing smokescreens get in the way are still not there.

(created with FAT’s great Google Tag script – love the ZEVS style one too)

Apparently Google has deleted entirely several music blogs entirely for infringement of copyright – even the ones that posted tracks with permission from the record label, artists or management.

I commented on this Guardian article, thought it bore repeating (and extending) here – shame the comments devolved into the sad ‘HANG EM COS THEY IS PIRATES’ rantage and many didn’t bother to actually READ the article.

Thing is, very few blogs nowadays post ‘illegal’ tracks. They get sent to them by pluggers and managers and even the artists themselves. If you have an email from the PR company saying ‘can you post this track?’ then why is it suddenly a) illegal and b) killing the music industry when the very industry is asking for blogs for free promotion?

This blog gets these ALL the time…I rarely ever post single tracks here, not ‘legal’ ones (mashups yes, but they almost never can be legal) but I still get deluged by these people. So I’ve expected to get hassle, never have in over 5 years (one polite request for a takedown from management – not a DMCA cos I’d just laugh), but I do self-host and use Wordpress, which to be honest if you’re running a blog on Blogspot or Blogger you are a fool, and should at very least have daily backups for when a post get pulled, or crosspost to another backup blog. Also only 3 of the 100 top blogs run on Blogger – note that more than a 3rd use self-hosted blog software such as Wordpress or Movable Type. No-one trusts free hosted blogs such as Blogger or Blogspot (or even Wordpress.com) for precisely this reason…it’s not like we haven’t been here before (but a few posts is different to an entire blog).

I do feel like Tangina in Poltergeist saying to the poor spirits still using Google and other free hosted blogs – come into the light! Come into the light! Really self-hosting is the only way to go if you are serious about blogging, also it makes the DMCA process less automatic and harder – hosting companies won’t be able to pull individual posts – you’re a paying customer who they don’t want to lose so will usually ask you first unless it’s something criminally illegal (child porn, wares etc), you can backup easily, and can separate your domain from your host so you can setup elsewhere easily if you do get the site pulled – but that is rare because to be brutally honest record labels aren’t going to expend that sort of lawyer time and energy. especially when at the click of a button some untrained oik can file a DMCA request on a hosted site.

I DO think there should be more transparency in blogging…far too many veiled PR and re-cooked press releases and dodgy dealing behind those script fonts and pictures of zero-size models. I’d rather people said ‘yes this was officially sent to me’ than pretend to be guerilla and underground and oh-so-radical (and ironically get burned for it). It would reveal the double-standard of the industry so clearly – they WANT DJ whitelabels, they WANT mashups, they WANT podcasts to play their music, they WANT blogs to blog it…but then when the official spotlight comes on then they pretend they didn’t. It’s bullshit. I’ve had industry A&R peeps tell me they court unofficial remixes – why do you think they release acapellas and instrumentals?

Blogging is exactly the same…they want the underground niche cred and free promo…but don’t want to officially admit that, or blame their online/viral PR company. Hypocrites indeed.

With all of that said – Google shouldn’t get off the hook…they are being evil again (such a surprise). The bloggers were unwise but putting out DMCAs for people posting THEIR OWN music? Same thing happened with the YouTube debacle – Warners and other companies putting out DMCAs to their own acts who wanted to post the videos. Google does need to sort out some way of checking if the bloggers have permission, or at least act within their OWN guidelines and give the bloggers warning. Until then, I strongly advise anyone to avoid Blogger and Blogspot and boycott them.

And in other news, we can +5 Warners in the ‘Suckiest Stupidest Copywhore Record Company OF ALL TIME’ stakes (head and head with EMI, folks!) cos they just decided there’s no future in streaming music services like Spotify.

Either a) trying hard to not be in the charts later this year b) thus wanting to go bust due to more head-in-the-sand policies c) want to win the much envied Radio Clash SUCKAR award (it’s a standing golden statue of Gary Glitter and Lars from Metallica in a ***CENSORED*** position). Who knows.

Right I’m frankly surprised at some of the responses to the whole Rage Against The Machine for Xmas #1 campaign (803,000 members and counting!) – they seem to be unaware of the current state of the music industry and why stuff like this matters.

1) “It’s Simon Cowell’s record company” - not strictly true. Syco is a subsidiary of Sony Music UK, but RATM’s label is another subsidiary in the states. Doubtful Simon will profit from RATM, possible if he’s got shares, but he could have shares in all companies for all we know. It will profit Sony but also Rage who are one of the most politically active groups. I’m happy to give them money, cos it’ll probably go to some good use. EDIT: they’ve announced that some of the proceeds are going to UK charity Youth Music and Shelter. I knew RATM would do that; great charities also.

Also may I remind you there are only 4 main record companies now, at least ones that have infrastructure to get a Xmas #1 or mass recognition. So you only have 1/4 chance of hitting a Sony product anyways. Sure you have some hits and novelty hits from the few smaller companies but they are rare – you’d think this might have changed in the digital age, but it hasn’t. Even the likes of XL had to band together with other labels to negotiate with iTunes et al and STILL got stiffed. Also many of the smaller hits when they rise up the charts get distribution deals with those big 4, so back to them again.

Also Sony is one of the less evil corporations – EMI and Warners give people hell over remixes and mashups, UMG via Interscope just got my videos pulled on YouTube and Myspace. Sony BMG I know encourage people to remix their stuff, at least in the R’n'B arena, and they’ve been like that since disco days I think. Certainly never got a DMCA or C&D from them. They see whitelabels and DJ remixes quite rightly as free promotion of their acts, although I’m sure if you start selling CDs in mass quantities like all record companies they would be down on you like a ton of bricked iPhones.

2) “It’s silly” or “It won’t change anything” – This is a funny one, especially as people tend to decry apathy in this day and age. You don’t get to choose what people power is used for, I’d prefer (and would fight) for it not to be used to lynch immigrants, but usually it’s for good purposes. What’s good in this? you might think.

Well it’s a symptom of an interesting shift where Facebook and Twitter are being used for real and not so real political action from MP expenses to Trafigura and Iran and yes Xmas single campaigns. The good is that people are actively doing something and being passionate, those groundswells could be used for great good (and evil) but if the original motivator is something other than self-interest and oil – from music lovers hating X-Factor’s damaging hold on their chart to climate change and making sure MPs are not hypocritical. It’s all part of the same movement.

So no, it’s not ’silly’ – it’s a bit of fun. As Eric Kleptone said about this in Facebook:

“Anyone that thinks it’s about the cash is really missing the point, in my opinion. Ever bought anything from a joke shop? Something from a pound shop you really didn’t really want but looked daft? It’s a fun thing to do, a wheeze! a jape! it’s like sticking drawing pins on your teacher’s chair and then sitting in the back of the class sniggering, waiting for him to come in. It won’t *do* anything other than cock a snook at someone that has more power and influence than you’ll ever have, but if there are cocks to be snooked, my god, I’ll be right there helping out.”

The other response he had that maybe people should think about where they spend money always rather than just this time was also totally on the money, too.

But being able to send that message, even a silly one, may or may not worry the likes of Simon Cowell (I think it might) but if it succeeds it will make a lot of people feel warm and fuzzy about campaigning online so maybe next time when it’s more serious, they’ll take part. And make certain people higher up nervous or aware of the power of such campaigns widening from being a bunch of geeks with too much time on their hands to mass democracy.That for me is what it’s about.

Oh and blowing a raspberry to Simon Cowell, that too

EDIT: 3) ‘It’s not appropriate’ ‘it has the word fuck in it’ – well unlike BBC Radio 5 Live who should have guessed they’d swear live on air, the band seem to have more grasp of the allure of the song, it’s central message ‘Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me’. In these sanitised photoshopped times, where bland yet hypocritically faintly shocking is king; there is a need to shake things up – not just for controversy but for wider reasons. The power of the media corporates which is now mostly the same as the record labels, the government clamping down on protest and even 3strikes, privacy online, CCTV and ‘terrorist’ monitoring (you can tell I’ve been reading Cory Doctorow’s ‘Little Brother’ can’t you?) is an undercurrent that is boiling under all this jovial seasonal ‘fun’ unrest. It’s a wider issue of censorship and taking back culture. ‘Take it back’, taking back ownership from the spoon-feeding media giants.

So remember to go buy RATM’s Killing in the Name Of before Saturday midnight; the X-Factor Joe Elderwotsit’s CD *boo hiss* goes on sale today.

via Podcasting News

‘Before The Music Dies‘ is a 2006 documentary about the state of the music industry without the shrill discussion about filesharing and that particular RIAA Weapon of Mass Distraction and very welcome because of it. Made by music lovers FOR music lovers; it interviews many people from Eric Clapton, Elvis Costello, a wonderfully on form Erykah Badu, Dave Matthews, Branford Marsalis and many more known and unknown. It covers the main reason that the music industry is changing and it’s not filesharing – the major corporations and their conservative management and lack of artist development and swallowing of radio – the homogeny of culture (monoculture) created from that.

The big 4 would like you to believe the 800-pound gorilla is filesharing and the internet, but largely it’s a convenient excuse for a bland-ishment and lack of support for artists and focusing purely on the bottom line – I mean how many major groups and artists you hear now have been dropped, still big/known ones which surprise you? It’s quite a lot – because unless you provide the hits then you’re out. People will support the music they love, and will fall in love with new music – but if you pump 80’s channels and the same old crap at them then yes they will switch off and treat it as background. It’s not the video game nor is it the internet that is killing music for the youth – it’s lack of innovation, creativity and support from the modern likes of John Hammond and Ahmet Ertegun that is killing music. Push bland Beyonce and Britney and tried and tested retro ‘hits’ at people and don’t provide anything new, of course the kids are going to drift off and do something else, or treat the music as wallpaper. For it IS wallpaper. Aural brainmulch candyfloss wallpaper.

But also this culture of fame, celebrity creates something far more worrying – something I’ve been talking with John recently is that people expect more and more instant feedback, they’ve become X-Factor fame junkies, it’s devalued in their eyes unless it’s somehow BIG and SUCCESSFUL. As far as I can tell it permeates all fields – not just music; many places where business has a grip on the cultural psyche – from the modern social spaces such as social media, to the older spheres such as broadcasting and education.

The worse thing about that is it can make artists devalue their own work in their own eyes, this drip drip drip brainwashing that X-Factor Pop Idol Heat magazine type successes is the benchmark of what’s good – or people don’t even try or embarassingly like the first auditions of X-Factor think they don’t have to practice or learn…the myth of the overnight success is very dangerous (and false – as people have pointed out their 5-10-15 years of ‘day’ working at their skills previous to that ‘night’) It’s turning yourself into a brand and product, and the alienation that entails – which as in the film if you are your own boss and company can be liberating, but most often than not you are a corporate puppet.

And when you have the likes of Cerys on BBC 6Music – a niche music lover’s radio station on DAB, publicly funded and thus removed from the need to be commercial – stressing that she might not get away with playing an 18 minute tune as I heard a few days ago, then you know something is extremely wrong in the state of Denmark (St). The idea of advertiser-friendly 4 minute songs has trickled into areas that shouldn’t need to care about them, in fact it’s in the remit NOT to be like other commercial radio, well that’s worrying.

The metrics the BBC is using – of RADAR and RAJAR figures – to justify it’s programming is the same as commercial radio, so to keep the ears they employ the same tactics and the same people, even if it goes against the very same idea of public broadcasting. They should be serving the niches and areas that are increasingly not filled by commercial interests, it’s not elitist it’s what their public remit is. Again and again though they defend their increasingly populist programming (even in the case of the newer digital stations there is no need to be) with audience figures. It’s meaningless. It should be more about audiences served and their happiness that they have some home and diversity in the bland homogenity of stations, rather than Strictly Come Dancing ratings war replicating the worst of commercial broadcasting. Worthy and treating your audience as intelligent is not wrong; and it’s dumbing down which is the real crime.

And it’s not just in media – the Success Factor plugs into so many things, people won’t watch or value a video unless it has 100,000s of views, won’t value someone’s contribution as ‘official’ unless they have 1000s or 100,000s of friends on Twitter or Facebook, won’t think a website or blog is big until it gets a lot of comments (although ironically most readers are passive and don’t comment). The celeb magazines are just a glamorous if inane symptom of a much deeper cause; what I call the numbers game. And most of the numbers game is actually faked as much as that BalloonBoy – people puffing up figures, fake sales, payola, fake comments, fake hits, SEO trickery and bullshit, autofollows and fake accounts. Why can’t we evaluate something on it’s own worth? And conversely work at stuff without expecting immediate reward or placing value systems on it that eventually suffocate the creativity? Is that so hard?

Branford Marsalis says it best in the video, 1hr 4mins in:

“What I’ve learned from my students is students today are completely full of shit. That is what I’ve learned from my students is that much like the generation before them the only thing they are interested in is you telling them how right they are and how good they are.

That is the same mentality that basically forces Harvard to give out B’s to people that don’t deserve them, out of the fear that they’ll go to other schools that will give them B’s and those schools will make the money.

We live in a country that seems to be in this massive state of delusion, where the idea of what you are is more important than you actually being that.…yeah my students all they want to hear how good they are and how talented they are. Most of them aren’t really willing to work to the degree to live up to that”