A Song A Day

I’m a big fan of music sites that encourage their communities to actively seek out new artists, whether by offering them a financial incentive (Amiestreet) or (as with The Sixty One) making a kind of multi-player game out of it.

Popcuts is a new site that gives fans a revenue cut of your music sales. You upload your tracks, decide how much of the price of each MP3 you want to share with those who buy it, and Popcuts takes care of everything else. I’m giving a big cut of my sales because it encourages people to listen – so far I’ve had about 30 downloads in the month my music’s been available. Not bad considering I haven’t had to do any marketing myself. It’s well worth checking this site out.

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Popularity: 1% [?]

Alternative title: Take profit-seeking out of music, and what do you need to succeed?

Here’s an analogy.

Think of the traditional record industry as a planet. Over time it’s grown bigger and bigger, and pulled all these other satellites (artists, managers, pluggers, promoters, fans, music writers, radio DJs, PR and marketing people) into its gravitational field. And the more satellites that are pulled in, the bigger it’s had to get. And the bigger it gets, the stronger its pull grows.

Gravity, in this analogy, is money. Take the money away, and the satellites spin off in wildly different directions, with nothing pulling them together. The unsigned artist is essentially an explorer in a spaceship, desperately zipping from satellite to satellite on very little fuel, trying to get attention. But the satellites are all over the place, one eye on the big planet (because it still looms massively, even if its pull has waned), the other trying to pay attention to all the little spaceships that keep zipping by – but really they’re just an annoyance.

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Popularity: 7% [?]

If you’re just starting out as a musician looking to use the internet as a promotional tool, there should be one question on your mind. It’s not, how can I make money? And it’s not, which social networks should I be on? Rather it’s, how do I get my music heard?

Social networks like Myspace may have millions of users, but it’s increasingly hard to get any of them to listen to your stuff if you don’t already have some kind of public profile. But there are other ways you can use the internet to get your music heard, right this second.

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Popularity: 9% [?]

One day soon I’m going to write a long overdue (and possibly deeply unfounded) rant about why internet nerds - and internet nerds like Pitchfork in particular - are destroying music. Until then, here’s an example of why it’s all going so wrong.

(To clarify: I don’t like Black Kids either, but Jesus…)

Two current stories on the web have elided in my mind and are causing my brain to overheat. So I’ve decided to use this post to try and work out the issues.

The first story is an amusing overview of the current ‘indie’ scene here in the UK, from the Independent. It’s wilfully curmudgeonly, but ultimately on the money: my own take is that we are, currently, living through a re-run of the mid-‘70s, with radio full of anodyne, identikit rock and one-off formula hits. We desperately need another cultural revolution like Punk – but where is it going to come from?

Some industry types have been harping on, in response to the article, that (to quote Weller, once the snarling anathema to all of this de-politicised, neutered, ‘landfill’ music) “the public gets what the public wants”. That is: stop saying Scouting For Girls are suicide-inducing in their dreadfulness, they’re successful so it’s obviously the kind of stuff music consumers like.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

A quick note about a new site I’ve just stumbled across, Musicbizhacks, the latest blog from Adrian Fusiarski, the man behind the excellent Buzzsonic.dj music industry directory.

Musicbizhacks consists mostly of links to digital music articles from around the web, but also includes Adrian’s own insightful musings on making a living from music in the web 2.0 world (check out this post for a great example).

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Popularity: 14% [?]

Two motivations for this post:

ONE: Hearing Ashlee Simpson’s new single ‘Outta My Head’ today. It represents the nadir of popular music. It was written by SIX!!! people. As a comparison, ‘Yesterday’, the most covered song in history, was written by Paul McCartney, one man, in his sleep.

So what’s gone wrong in the last 40 years, that we’ve gone from Yesterday to “Ay ya ya ya ya”?

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Popularity: 20% [?]

In the old days, labels used to give you an advance when you signed a recording contract with them. It wasn’t really your money, it was just a loan, and if you weren’t successful it usually left you in sizeable debt. Now, they lock you into 360 degree deals and squeeze you for every little bit of revenue they can.

Forget about advances, and certainly forget about signing a 360 deal right now. So is the label itself important, beyond the other services it offers, or offers access to?

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Popularity: 16% [?]

As I mentioned previously, destroying the record labels because they’ve been slow to adapt to the new digital landscape is something of a blinkered view to take. The record ‘industry’ as it stands right now consists of a huge system of interlinking parts that, while they may no longer work too well together – or at all – in a new world of torrents and Hypemachines and widgets, still manage to occasionally gear-crunch and propel new artists towards success. It’s tough to make it when you’ve got this - somewhat rusty - machinery behind you. Is it even tougher, though, if you haven’t?

Let me simplify. We’re at a turning point in the story of music. We all know this. The factory owners who oversee all that machinery of music production and promotion are struggling to adapt. Meanwhile, the new wave of DIYers are getting to grips with the opportunities the internet’s made available to them. The labels can learn a lot from the DIYers. But what can the DIYers learn from the labels? That machinery, rusty though it is today, has been working for over 50 years – it helped launch the careers of most, if not all, of your favourite artists. The system that, on the one hand, has made a global superstar of Leona Lewis, and, on the other, turned Foals into this year’s cult band, is a system that undoubtedly works on its own terms. So what can you learn from it?

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Popularity: 18% [?]

Can you not be both? Amidst all the Myspace Music hyperbole came one phrase from Chris DeWolfe that slightly made me shudder - “This is really a mega-music experience that is transformative in a lot of ways,” he said. “It’s the full 360-degree revenue stream.” 360-degree streams is the buzzword du jour of the major labels, and as a concept it’s a hugely dispiriting development for any artists looking to win a traditional record deal with any of them.

But you’re not, of course. You want to remain in control of your music and your music career. Does that mean you need to stop thinking like a major record label exec?

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Popularity: 19% [?]