Tag Archives: The Music Business

Delain Fall Victim to Cloth-Eared Bean Counters

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Tim Hall

Some people question why I frequently describe the major labels as being run by cloth-eared bean-counters. It’s because of things like what’s just happened to Symphonic metal band Delain.

You finish your album, and then you don’t know when the release is. But you know that fans are waiting for it. We were so satisfied with the album, and also our producer was satisfied. But some executive nut-case just doesn’t get it, and decides: “Well, let’s not release it.” Other people do get it, and right now, they are talking about how and when to release it. It’s a nightmare! We don’t have control over it, and at the moment, we can only wait.

It’s an old story. Delain were signed to Roadrunner, who got taken over by Warners. Who, if their head-in-the-sand attitude towards digital licensing is anything to go by, show every sign of being the most clueless of the majors. As so often happens with this sort of takeover, Warners fired many the people who the band knew and trusted, and now they’re sitting on the record. Maybe they haven’t got anyone left who knows how to market a band the major label probably would never have signed in the first place. Blogger Ronnie Soo has even speculated that they want to re-mould the band’s singer Charlotte Wessels as a radio-friendly pop star, and ditch the band.

This sort of crap happens a lot with the majors. They give every impression they’re run by marketeers and accountants who’s most significant characteristic is that they are not passionate about music. Yes, this sort of thing has always gone on, but in the days of social media when bands can communicate directly with their fanbase, it’s harder for labels to pull this sort of dick move and get away with it.

This is why I had some serious mixed feelings when I heard that two bands I know had recently been signed. I hope and pray that the bands knew what they were doing, and scrutinised the small print of the contracts carefully, so that they and their fans never get shafted the same way.

Some bands forget that “The guy they trust” in the label when they sign might not be around for the duration of the contract, especially if the label they signed to gets eaten by a bigger one. I’d advise any band signing a record deal (and their lawyer) to work on the assumption that, however friendly the label guys seem, they *will* try to screw you, and make sure the contract is watertight. In the worst case they need the option to walk away without the label being able to hold their record hostage.

Hopefully Delain will be able to release the album, and find a label they can continue to work with. Sadly, and cynical as it may seem, if Warners are really only interested in nothing but money, it’s in their interest for Delain to split up rather than sign to another label. Less competition.

Posted in Music News | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Stop the Stop Internet Piracy Act

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Tim Hall

If you visit Wikipedia today, you will notice the site has “gone dark” in response to the Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), two appalling lobbyist-drafted pieces of legislation which the big business part of the entertainment industry is trying to railroad past America’s technologically illiterate legislators. Although SOPA has run into trouble, it’s not completely dead yet, and must be prevented from shambling back in to life.

The big studios and labels love to quote figures stating how much money they’re losing because of copyright violation, and how many jobs are allegedly at stake. Far too often lawmakers and major media outlets will accept these figures at face value and not subject them to any kind of scrutiny. Just how much of their declining profits is to do with “piracy”, and how much is down to them losing market share because the internet has eroded their role as gatekeepers, and allows smaller self-publishing competing content creators to flourish?

As The Electronic Freedom Foundation says, if laws like this are allowed to pass, they will have a severe impact on any sites that rely or allow user-generated content, from Facebook or YouTube down to blogs that allow comments such as this one. Site owners will be forced to police all content, including any external links, with the threat of being shut down if they don’t enforce it zealously enough. The overhead of doing this could well undermine the viability of many high-traffic sites, which perhaps explains why some venture capitalists won’t be funding Internet start-ups if this passes. Remember Fotopic.net? That could be the fate of many of your favourite sites.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of copyright and piracy, this is a badly-drafted law which will do more harm than good.

Despite what professional trolls like Andrew Orlowski would have you believe, this isn’t just a few “geeks” and “freetards” whining about some impractical libertarian utopia. It’s nothing lass than handing over the keys of the entire Internet over to the big studios, major record labels, and big publishers, and giving them more or less unfettered power to shut down anything they don’t like, regardless of whether it infringes copyright or not. The lack of any checks and balances gives enormous scope for abuse, for example, using bogus copyright claims to threaten sites whose real crime is publishing bad reviews.

Before you accuse me of being a “freetard”, no, I don’t believe anyone has a right to consume music and film without any financial compensation – most working musicians I know are aware of how much I spend on your music a year. But this bill goes way, way beyond anything acceptable as a means of enforcing copyright, and could do untold damage to all kinds of legitimate businesses.

And any Americans reading this – Please fix your rotten, corrupt political system, which allows well-funded lobbyists to trample over the rights and freedoms of ordinary people, not just in America, but in the whole of the world.

Posted in Music, Music Opinion, Religion & Politics | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Ryan Dancey, Still Wrong

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Tim Hall

This article on the future of the Role-Playing Games industry, specifically Dungeons and Dragons, contains a completely ridiculous quote from Ryan Dancey

Kids stopped playing with trains, and the businesses that remained dedicated to hobbyists who got more disposable income as they grew up, until the price of the hobby was out of reach of anyone except those older hobbyists. Eventually, it became a high-end hobby with very expensive products, sold to an ever-decreasing number of hobbyists. As those folks die, the hobby shrinks. That is what is happening to the tabletop RPG business.”

Ryan Dancey knows nothing about the model railway hobby.

He reminds me of the record label executives trying to defend a dying business model in the music industry – like Dancey, they’re marketing types who only care about selling “product”, and aren’t interested in actual creativity. Dancey was notorious a decade ago for a master plan to drive all games other than D&D out of business, spouting nonsense about “Network externalities”. If he’d been working for a model railway company he would have made his mission to destroy N gauge and 0 gauge in order to make 00 more popular.

It seems to me that there are a lot of parallels between the RPG industry and the cottage industry end of the music business. It’s all about creative types taking advantage of massively reduced barriers to entry to product things that can be sold direct to the customer, and using the Internet to build communities around those products. This is bad news if your career, like that of Ryan Dancey, is based on marketing things that others create – they don’t need you any more, and the viability of their businesses in a fragmented market often depend on them not having to share their revenue with you.

The irony is that one of the things fuelling the cottage industry is the Open Game Licence, which Ryan Dancey himself was responsible for…

Posted in Games, SF and Gaming | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Don’t Buy the Pink Floyd Box Sets

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Tim Hall

I see there’s a shock-and-awe advertising campaign for the reissues of the classic 70s albums by Pink Floyd.

Yes, an album like Dark Side of the Moon is all-time classic which has stood the test of time and has finally emerged from the long shadow cast by of Punk to take its rightful place in the British Rock Canon. But let’s face it, if you really cared about the album, you’d already have it on CD, right?

September has been one of the best months for new progressive rock releases I can remember for a long, long time. In the space of two weeks there have been new releases by Dream Theater, Opeth, Anathema, Matt Stevens, Steve Hackett and Steve Wilson. That’s one hell of a lot of new music, and you can have all of it for the price of just one of the ridiculously overpriced “Immersion editions” that you’ll probably only ever listen to the once.

I realise the target market for these things is the middle-aged bloke who stopped caring about new music when he got married and had kids decades ago, and now in the throes of his mid-life crisis is desperately trying to reconnect with his long lost youth. He’s probably never even heard of Opeth.

Don’t be that guy. Don’t buy the box sets. Pink Floyd really don’t need your money. And EMI certainly don’t deserve it.

Posted in Music, Music Opinion | Tagged , | 36 Comments

Yet Another Music Biz Rant.

Posted on January 30, 2011 by Tim Hall

Sometimes I wonder if there are people out there who really believe there are no ways to find new music apart from either listening to Radio One or surfing MySpace completely at random. Just read this commenter in a thread about the failure (so far) of digital music products.

I know this sounds trite but it would really help if the big music companies did their job as “gatekeepers” and keep the mediocre music away from the masses. What ever happened to quality A&R departments? With the proliferation of cheap music sequencing programs, horrible club DJs and radio that is beyond unbearable, quality control is more important than ever!

It’s actually worse that that, Big Music is actively keeping far better music away from the masses. They’re pretty much only interested in the lowest common denominator music that follows a small number of proven formulas that they know how to market. And with more and more discerning music fans having made their excuses and left the mainstream, Big Music is increasingly left with the people who can’t or won’t seek out new music for themselves.

I personally think the gatekeeper/elite tastemaker model is fundamentally broken anyway and deserves to die. For better or worse, the Internet has fragmented the market, allowing artists in niche genres to market their music directly, bypassing that small and corrupt clique of gatekeepers and tastemakers.

Such artists rely on fan-to-fan recommendations to build an audience rather than on Big Music’s shock-and-awe advertising campaigns. Perhaps the role of new digital music startups ought to be to encourage that sort of thing, rather than prop up the dying major label business model? The thing about independent artists in niche genres is their business model depends not so much of gaining the largest possible audience, rather on minimising the number of middlemen between them and their audience. Digital startups are new middlemen, they’re only of any use to artists if the value they add is more than the cut they take. And they’re only any use to music fans if they act as a sort of smart filter, perhaps using some kind of wisdom-of-crowds approach to filter out the stuff that falls below the Sturgeon threshold.

Don’t expect the major labels to support such a thing – While they claim to speak for up-and-coming artists, the reality has always been that they’ll do their damnedest to marginalise every new artist except for the small minority that they choose to sign.

Posted in Music, Music Opinion | Tagged | 5 Comments

mFlow’s 20p-a-track Sale

Posted on January 5, 2011 by Tim Hall

Music streaming and downloading site mFlow has been having a January sale.  For a few days, they reduced the price of all downloads to 20p a song, or 20p x the number of songs for the whole album.  It’s resulted in something of a feeding frenzy; I think I bought ten albums altogether; and judging by the steady stream of credit notification emails I’ve been getting, many others have been doing the same thing.  20p for a song or two or three quid for an album is well within impulse-buying territory in a way a £7.99 album is not.

My purchases included a couple of lesser back-catalogue albums I’ve only got on vinyl from Rainbow and Blue Öyster Cult, a few albums I’d passed on when they came out, such as a couple of recent Marillion live albums, and “After” by Scandinavian metal artist Ihsahn, which I decided to check out since it had appeared in several people’s end-of-year lists. I flowed on track from that with the words “This album is so awesome I feel guilty for paying only £1.60 for it”, and promptly got three 20% commissions for further sales!

Since I’ve seen both The Reasoning and Mostly Autumn coming up in my credit notification emails, I do wonder how artists feel about their work being sold for such low prices – I do remember one RPG writer I won’t name being not at all impressed to find one of his works in the remaindered bin at Stabcon a few years back.  But surely any revenue is better than none, and gets there music heard by people who might not otherwise have listened.  From such beginnings, fandom can start, if the music is awesome enough.

It does make we wonder what the rational price for MP3 downloads ought to be nowadays.  This year I’ve paid everything from that £1.60 for the download of the Ihsahn album, to well over double the price of a regular CD  for the pre-order special edition of “Go Well Diamond Heart” by Mostly Autumn, and I really can’t say that either was not a “fair” price.  In one case I was taking a gamble on a completely unheard-of band, with only Dom Lawson’s word for whether it was any good, and the other was a fan pre-order for an album which would not have been possible to record otherwise.

Time will tell what sort of pricing strategy labels and artists will take in the future.  It may well be that with universal “always on” internet connections we’ll all move towards streaming anyway.  But I think the days of pricing album downloads so as not to undermine CD sales are almost certainly numbered.

What does anyone else think?

Posted in Music | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Stupid Music Journalist Quote of the Day

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Tim Hall

Comes from The Guardian’s Mark Beaumont, in a blog post about Radiohead’s Kid A

By the mid-noughties, just like the mid-90s, alternative and mainstream were conjoined by a frothing mass media and shrinking major-label budgets – there seemed little distance between Kasier Chief and Sugababe, between Arctic Monkey and Crazy Frog. There was nowhere for an underground to be.

That really does speak wonders about the smallness of cultural bubble that “mainstream” music critics inhabit, doesn’t it? Just about all the music I love just simply doesn’t exist as far as they’re concerned.

Posted in Music, Music Opinion | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Time to bring back Top of the Pops?

Posted on September 12, 2010 by Tim Hall

On The Guardian website Miranda Sawyer campaigns for a return of Top of the Pops. Unfortunately she spoils a good argument with the mistaken opinion that The Mercury Music Prize represents the sole valid alternative to Simon Cowell’s X-Factor, and they are the only two games in town.

I’m not sure if the Top of the Pops format will work today, but we desperately need something to reverse the situation in the past decade whereby the general music-buying population is more or less completely cut out of the loop in determining which records and artists become successful.

With records played to death on the radio before they’re even released, we’ve reached the point where everything mainstream audiences get to hear is decided in advance by a very small number of elite tastemakers from the record companies and the media. The Mercury Music prize gives every appearance of being run by this same clique.

What was great about TOTP was the way it used a strict formula based on chart position to decide who appeared on it – nobody got vetoed because a clique of cloth-eared idiots from BBC light entertainment thought they didn’t fit the show’s format. If enough fans went out and bought the record, they got on. So we had Mötorhead on prime-time TV playing “Ace of Spades”, something which would be unthinkable now.

What’s very notable is the way the BBC marginalises genres like metal, jazz, blues or folk, despite their popularity up and down the country, in favour of various flavours of ‘indie’, which is all they think exists as an alternative to X-Factor pop. Yes, they might do the odd BBC3 documentary, but they tend to be very nostalgia-orientated, and don’t feature up and coming acts. Look at their festival coverage. For example, there was an eclectic mix of artists at Glastonbury this year, but you’d never have known it from the bands shown on TV.

Maybe genres have become so fragmented in today’s net-connected multi channel world that a crossover hit like “Ace of Spades” simply isn’t possible any more. But surely the best music of all genres deserves better than being trapped in separate musical ghettos?

Posted in Music, Music Opinion | Tagged , | 9 Comments

What is the point of The Mercury Music Prize?

Posted on September 9, 2010 by Tim Hall

What is the point of The Mercury Music Prize?

I’m not going to comment on the merits or otherwise of winners The XX – they’re so far removed from my own tastes in music that I’m simply not qualified to judge them. But I think it is fair to comment on the very obvious exclusion of entire genres from Mercury shortlists.

Apart from the token jazz and folk entries, it does seem dominated by various sub-genres of indie plus the odd hip-hop record. Far from being as broad as it’s apologies claim, it’s pretty much restricted to the sorts of artists that Apple Macintosh-owning urban metrosexuals might have heard of. I recognise that prog is too niche, but it’s unthinkable, for example, for a metal band to make the shortlist. Admittedly a lot of cutting-edge metal seems to be Scandinavian these days, and The Mercury is restricted to British and Irish acts. But why have Iron Maiden never got nominated? And when was the last time an out-and-our pop album got nominated? Surely Simon Cowell’s karaoke drivel hasn’t killed pop completely?

Alexis Petridis’s Guardian Article gives the game away – he doesn’t quite come and out and say it, but I think the subtext and inference is pretty clear. The main purpose of The Mercury Music Prize is indeed not to celebrate the best of British music in all it’s diversity, but is merely a cynical ploy to sell records to the demographic that doesn’t know much about music, but wants to think of itself as cool and sophisticated.

Which is a perfect justifcation of why, despite the genre’s eternal popularity, you’re never going to get a Metal band in Mercury shortlist. Metal just isn’t a genre you can sell to people like David Cameron or William Hague.

Posted in Music, Music Opinion | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Whither mFlow

Posted on September 5, 2010 by Tim Hall

I’ve been using mFlow for several months now (you can see my profile here). I’ve described it as “the bastard offspring of Spotify, iTunes and Twitter. It combines Twitter-style social networking, online music streaming and mp3 sales. It’s actually great fun, and has exposed me to a number of artists whose music I’d never have heard otherwise.

The way it works is people “flow” tunes to their followers, who can then listen to the complete song. Following works like it does on Twitter – it’s completely asymmetric, in that there’s no obligation to follow someone back if they choose to follow you. Follow friends, or follow random people who have great taste in music, it’s up to you. If you really like a song, you can reflow it to your own followers, or purchase it as a DRM-free mp3 download, And when someone buys a track, whoever flowed it gets a 20% commission on the sale.

It has two big drawbacks at the moment. Firstly, their catalogue is nothing like as comprehensive as I’d like it to be – while they have three of the four majors and many of the larger indies on board, it gets very spotty once you get down to smaller labels and independent artists. There is practically nothing from female-fronted prog scene I follow; currently there’s a single song by The Reasoning taken from a compilation, and one cover by Magenta, and that’s it. Not even Fish’s post-EMI releases are there. These are precisely the sort of artists I’d love to be able to use mFlow to spread the word about.

Secondly, it’s currently UK only, and my online friends network isn’t constrained by geographical boundaries; I’ve got online friends in America and continental Europe who share my tastes in music, and can’t use mFlow yet.

Now iTunes have introduced something called “Ping” which seems to do much of the same thing, there are fears that it could damage mFlow. iTunes is the 800lb gorilla in the downloading market, keen to lock everyone in their closed proprietary ecosystem, and are quite likely to stomp on a startup who’s established a niche that they want for themselves. Let’s hope mFlow survives.

Posted in Music | Tagged , | 1 Comment