"music" in Weblog

Trent Reznor was disheartened by fans not paying for the Saul Williams album but I think he proved that independent music can viably be given away. Selling 30,000 copies of a niche album in its first couple of month in the wild with zero promotion is pretty damned good in my book. I believe that they succeeded in making money despite a flawed execution. So here’s a manifesto, of sorts. A mix of ideology, marketing and psychology.

The premise is this:

• People are basically good.
• People are prepared to pay for things they value.
• People fall in love with music.
• Long term relationships are more important than short term profit.
• Reciprocity is far more powerful than most give it credit for.

So you have an album. Great. Give the singles away. Let as many people hear it as is humanly possible. No one makes money from singles anyway so minimise distribution and manufacturing costs. Get it out there. Give it to podcasters, broadcasters, bloggers, Last.fm, Pandora, make it available for download on MySpace, Facebook, BitTorrent and the band website.

Where possible ask, but do not require, an email address. Email addresses are becoming part of our identities. They are valuable to us. We don’t like spam. If I choose to give you my email address then I’m demonstrating a degree of commitment to your cause. That’s valuable information and the first step on the trust ladder. Many won’t leave an address though. That’s not ideal but it’s okay. If they like the music they’ll be back. To help them find their way back leave clues. Put a URL instead of an album title and a short voice-over after the end of the track. The URL should point to a page dedicated to the track they’ve just listened to. Comments, discussion, sleeve notes from the artist, perhaps links to other artists that influenced the track, upcoming gig listings and releases. It’s a social object. Somewhere for people to get involved - like reading the gatefold in the company of a bunch of like-minded people. And include one more thing. A payment form.

If people like the track they should be able to pay for it. The song may be a grower. They may only stumble across it on a blog months after the release. Perhaps it gets used in a commercial or on Richard and Judy. Maybe their visiting friend from New York has it on her iPod. They should be able to pay whatever they feel it was worth to them. It may be nothing - that’s fine - your music isn’t for everyone. If they like it enough to pay be sure to ask them what they thought. Grab that feedback. You can use that to hone future releases plus it’s probably worth displaying a few of your favourite comments on the track’s page.

For those people who pay, try and offer them a little something by way of a thank you. Doing the right thing is fine but we’re conditioned to expect something for our money and we want everyone to leave happy. That ‘something’ might be a super-high-quality recording or some early demos or mixes. It’s a token to show that your appreciate their money.

Why do I think this will work? Because people are basically good. You’ve given them something that they value. Give them time to realise that they value it and then make it as easy for them to do the right thing as possible. But remember that there isn’t a single correct response - there are as many as you have fans. For some it might be emailing the track to all their friends, expanding your audience. For others it’ll be coming to your next gig, packing the place. Some will part with their hard earned cash in return for your baby. A few will do all these things and more.

Oh, and on a side note: do give away demos, sketches and whatever else on the band’s MySpace page, websites, whatever. Your early adopter fans get something exclusive and you get feedback from your core audience. Everyone’s a winner.

We know the music industry is broken. Download culture is too entrenched and no court case will change that. But society is changing too. We’re becoming more and more wired into the internet. We spend increasing amounts of time socialising online. We’ve seen sparks of what this can mean from Nizlopi, The Arctic Monkeys and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah but they were really just an extension of the old industry. Those acts used the online community to make the industry take notice but acts like Radiohead, Saul Williams and Jane Siberry are going a step further.

The London music scene seems to be on fire at the moment! I can’t remember a time when there were more gigs to go to… In the last 10 days I’ve seen:

• Crystal Castles
• Danny Rapscallion of The Rapscallions
• Cardboard Radio
• Rosemary
• A jam session at the Macbeth
• Miss Odd Kid
• Middleman
• Sportsday Megaphone
• Metronomy
• Scout Niblett
• Bonnie Prince Billy

One interesting thing I noticed while putting together this list is that it didn’t even occur to me to try and find the bands’ own websites… I went straight to MySpace. MySpace has become the de facto standard for music urls - no mean feat. A lot of things about MySpace annoy me but I can’t argue with how simple its made it for anyone and everyone to get themselves online.

Incidentally though - everyone should check out Metronomy. They’re absolutely ace!

The Netflix $1 million competition to improve their recommendation engine has reminded me of something I said to my brother in Virgin Megastore the other night… I’d wandered in to kill some time while waiting for him to turn up for a gig, which is something I used to do a lot. I’ve spent hundreds of hours in music stores over the years. Mostly little indies but the big boys often get stuff the little chaps don’t and the sales can be interesting. What struck me this time though is that I got bored very quickly. Now that never happens to me while shopping for music! So what’s changed?

I’ve always been into fairly niche music. My vinyl addiction (now kicked) had me in and out of the hip hop shops around Brighton, Birmingham and London listening to dozens of records and chatting to other people in the shops. I’d take my stack to the desk to pay and the guy behind the counter, who I bought from and chatted to every week, would have another stack set aside for me to check out. Recommendations and pounding the pavement.

Then I moved over to buying a lot of my records from the internet. I’d chat to my mate J, who worked in a record shop in Leicester, listen to all the samples on Juno, read the Picadilly Records newsletter and make my choices. Recommentations and elbow grease.

When I stopped buying records I moved back to CDs. Both Amazon and Play do a decent job of divining my taste from previous purchases but I’ve relied a lot on late night MTV2, XFM, talking to friends and reading ArtistDirect bios to find new stuff. Over the last couple of years I’ve definitely not bought as much music as I used to. Recommendations, but more passive on my part.

In the last few months though I’ve started using Last.fm, MySpace and the iTunes Store. Last.fm, via AudioScrobbler, does an absolutely incredible job of figuring out my taste. And if I’m in a slightly different mood I can always go to the radio section and type in a few artists to get something that is outside of my normal listening preference. I also love the social aspect to it. Not from an interaction point of view but as a way of getting my friends’ recommendations at my own leisure. Every week I’ll have a browse through my friends’ profiles and listen to anything I don’t recognise. It’s social proof in its rawest form - they’re actually listening to this stuff so they must like it. If I’m taken with a track I’ll either buy through Last.fm or head to iTunes for instant gratification. I own the tracks within 30 seconds.

I use MySpace the same way - it allows me to mine my friends’ recommendations. I’ve found some great stuff just wandering through profiles. If I like what I find I’ll either download songs direct from the band’s profile or search the iTunes Store.

All of a sudden I’m back buying music again. And lots of it. I’ve bought 108 songs from the iTunes Store in the last month and that doesn’t include the stuff I’ve got from Bleep and various other MP3 stores. Most importantly though, I’m absoluitely loving it.

I reckon that I’m a classic Long Tail consumer. Yes, I’m interested in some stuff from the head, but for the most part I’m niche. If you look at my consumer behaviour over the years I fit exactly the profile that recommendation engines are trying to cater to. And I have grown to expect that kind of service. Virgin just can’t compete. It doesn’t carry the music I want and it has no way of directing me to it even if it did. Even during sales their physical products aren’t much cheaper than Play or Amazon Marketplace and I can get instant access to my purchase from iTunes or Bleep if that’s what I want. So what can they offer me? Very, very little indeed.

I was listening to my favourite podcast (Radio SubPop) today and it got me thinking… It’s a series of tracks given away by a record label. Why? Aren’t they reducing their artists’ saleability by giving away all this music? They get none of the licensing money that they would from radio either and there are no adverts to sweeten it for them. What’s in it for them?

I remember being told by one of my friends that hardly anyone makes money from an indie single (unless you are Gnarles Berkeley) - they’re tools to help promote the album. Releasing a single requires a lot of effort: design, promotion, distribution. All for 500-2000 units shifted… It must be incredibly time consuming.

Now consider a podcast. It’s almost free to run and you have a base of subscribers from your target market receiving your music regularly. That must be the most cost effective album promotion possible. Consumers get some free music, the labels get some free promotion and everyone’s happy.

There are a couple of catches though. Where do they get these subscribers from in the first place? Some promotion is therefore required. Further into the future, what happens when podcasts have become a mainstream medium? Surely it’ll become increasingly difficult to get noticed as the big labels wade in with their hefty wallets. And finally, podcasts suffer from the same problem as RSS - pull technology reduces serendipidy. Why would you subscribe to a labels’s feed if you don’t know their music already?

So podcasts have their problems but the labels to crack them will have a year or more’s head start on the rest of the game… So far I’ve bought 4 albums after hearing singles on the Radio Subpop podcast and it’s not cost them anything to get me hooked.

MySpace has become incredibly popular in the last year. It now boasts somewhere over 55 million members with another 150,000 people signing up every day. That’s simply incredible. It’s approaching the population of Britain and growing 150 times faster! And it’s launched its first (as far as I know) number one act on this side of the pond, the Arctic Monkeys, as well as propelling Clap Your Hands Say Yeah to half a million sales in the first week of their album’s release. It’s getting to be more society than social…

Despite its success, everyone I know who’s signed up slates its design. Now, the web development community puts a very high value on great design but we’re obviously not getting the big picture… The site is built on a great idea. Wood for the trees. I read somewhere recently that if every entrepreneur stopped to make the right decisions then many of our farourite products wouldn’t exist. I’ve seen this first hand ar Wordtracker: Mike and Andy wrote the system in 3 months and got it out there. Since then they’ve been working hard to do things again, the right way, but it’s an incredibly long process. If they’d done it that way from the beginning they would never have been able to afford the time and the product woudn’t exist.

This reminds me of Peter Morville’s user experience diagram with the interlocking hexagons combining to make a useful application. The sucess of a website doesn’t depend comletely on any single thing. An acceptable design will satisfice if the end result is great. All those folks out there writing webapps on the Web 2.0 wave would do well to remember this. Start with that great idea that solves a real problem and people will come.

When the JCB song video did the rounds a few weeks ago I was completely charmed. I watched it through several times, ordered the album and then spent a while browsing the Monkeehub website. That’s every marketing man’s dream! Not only did I buy the product I also spent time looking up others involved.

Now, I’ve bought albums based on videos before - I have a notepad that I carry around with me that has band names and song titles scrawled all over it, but I don’t think the experience has ever been this easy. Because I saw the video online, it was only a couple of short clicks to get everything I needed… Offline it’s more of a chore: I get distracted, something else comes along, whatever. This one medium approach is something I’ve never come across before.

Are we going to see more of this kind of thing? What is the audience of MTV2? I’m told it’s relatively small… The catch is that to flourish on the web either the song or the video have to be something special, so that rules out a lot of the major label signings. Monkeehub did an absolutely incredible job, perfectly matching the tone of both the music and the lyrics, and the song itself is great. I’m not such a fan of the rest of the album, to be honest, but my point is that the online promo did something I very rarely do: go straight out and spend my money.

I would dearly love to know how Nizlopi’s sales have done since that video started circulating.

It’s been a few weeks since this year’s Big Chill at Eastnor Castle and I’ve had some time to reflect.

I’ve been to every Big Chill they’ve had at Eastnor and they’re always good fun… This year’s was a little different though. To be perfectly honest, the line-up was sub-standard. Who were the headliners? I can’t really remember - none of them made much of an impression. What about the other acts? The best were the ones I’d either heard or seen before: London Elektricity, Bonobo, Emiliana Torrini, Hextatic, Ukelele Orchestra, Alice Russell, Benny Sings…

There were only a couple of surprises in there for me: Roisin Murphey and Fat Freddy’s Drop. Roisin is a loon but fantastic with it and Fat Freddy’s are totally unique. Now, both those acts were awesome but therein lies the disappointment - in previous years I’ve come away with dozens of records on my shopping list. This year I came away with two.

The funny thing is though, I had easily as good a time this year as I did last year. Why? Where the standard of the main stages seems to have dropped, everything else about the festival has grown up. The bars had great line-ups, with well-known DJs playing all day every day. Fat Tuesdays was particularly good, (my highlights there being Brewster and Belson, Andy Smith, Bugz in the Attic, Soul Jazz and Yam Who?) but the Strongbow tent rocked too. Then there was the more-surreal-than-usual Art Trail and the crazy circus tent thing that I didn’t make it into but everyone’s raved about since.

I completely expect next year’s festival to be a belter. All they need is to get the live line-up back to the level it’s been at for the previous years and maintain the goings on around the periphery. I have every confidence that they’ll do it.

Oh, but PLEASE Big Chill, get more parking attendants for the Monday! It took 4 hours to get off-site last year and over an hour this year simply because the one chap there manning the gate (understandably) couldn’t cope with ten thousand cars.

I’ve just been shown Preloaded’s video for Evil Nine’s track “Crooked” and thought it’d be worth sharing. It’s done in Flash - no big deal - but check the hand movements. They’re actually animated properly, no tweening. Good job!