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Pink Floyd’s legal victory over EMI is a triumph for artistic integrity
Mar 12th
The prog-rock band’s court win against their record label is a vindication of the album as a creative format
They don’t often look cheery in photos – and at least two of them can barely stand to be in the same room – but Pink Floyd have a lot to celebrate. The prog-rock legends won a pivotal victory against record company EMI over the sale of their own music. Basically, EMI wanted to make their classic concept albums available to download as individual songs. The band, however, prefer their albums to be downloaded as they were made: in their entirety, as complete musical works. And the judge agreed with Floyd.
At first glance, their motivation seems a little pretentious, recalling a time when supergroups like Led Zeppelin only released albums because they were serious artists and above all that pop stuff, man. However, Floyd’s victory is more than just musical snobbery: it’s a triumph for artistic integrity.
Michelangelo wouldn’t have wanted his Sistine Chapel ceiling to be chiselled into bits and flogged to individual buyers, so why should the same fate happen to Floyd’s painstakingly crafted The Dark Side of the Moon? Floyd’s most famous album appeared in 1973, when “long-playing records” appeared on vinyl. Back then, unless acts released tracks as singles, the only way of hearing individual tracks alone was to fiddle with the needle or hold a microphone in front of the stereo – a popular pastime among 70s teens – and record Roger Waters and co, perhaps accompanied by the sound of the family dog barking at the postman.
Downloading has changed everything. Now we can dip into albums, taking a little bit here and there. It’s a wonderful way of experiencing music, especially music you have never heard before, without having to fork out on an LP. However, the downside has been the slow death of the album as a creative form.
In recent years, the art of releasing a collection of songs that flow perfectly and make sense as a complete statement has faced a double onslaught. The digital era meant bands were suddenly having to come up with more and often inferior tracks just to pad out the longer CD format. But downloading has had a greater impact. The likes of Radiohead still take great care to release crafted albums, but often bands don’t really record albums any more. They record collections of downloadable tracks.
The upside of this is that many albums tend to have less filler; gone are the days of “frontloaded” LPs where a couple of hit singles at the start are followed by a lot of mush. Now, every track has to be good enough to be potentially downloaded. However, where would this approach would have left some of the greatest albums ever made? Would David Bowie’s opus The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars had anything like the same impact if people were able to dip in and out, experiencing the Ziggy character’s rise but avoiding his ultimate fate as a Rock ‘N’ Roll suicide? Granted, many concept albums are ludicrous prog-rock conceits. But it’s equally unthinkable to imagine hearing a non-concept masterpiece like Joy Division’s Closer in bite-sized chunks, rather than experiencing the full, unfolding horror/triumph of the second side’s stunning four-song sequence.
Joy Division (and, for years, New Order) refused to release album tracks as singles, treating albums and singles as separate entities, a stance recently adopted by MGMT. If you want to hear Pink Floyd tracks as standalones, download the songs they released as singles, like 1967’s psychedelic cross-dressing anthem Arnold Layne (also on compilations like Relics) or 1979’s teacher-baiting Another Brick in the Wall. Or download albums like Wish You Were Here and Meddle to hear as the creators intended. The marketing men might not approve, but it will be good for music and, more importantly, the fate of the album.
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The record industry fights its corner in the download age | Helienne Lindval
Mar 12th
Far from facing extinction, the record industry is still a vital cog in the music-making machine, claims a report. But will the working relationship between artist and label ever be the same?
Record labels have been on the receiving end of much criticism lately. They’ve been criticised for heavily lobbying those involved in passing the digital economy bill, accused of greediness, of being dinosaurs, of being unwilling to embrace the internet, of treating artists unfairly – even of being obsolete. Now they’re fighting back in an attempt to justify their existence.
A report published this week by IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), claims that record companies invest $5bn (£3.3bn) a year worldwide in artists, and that the “ripple effect” of this investment helps generate a broader music sector, including live music, radio and publishing, worth around $160bn annually. The report also estimates that more than two million people are employed globally in the broader music economy.
In an apparent response to those who claim that, with the internet’s ability to connect artists directly with their fans, record labels will become obsolete, John Kennedy (chairman of IFPI) says: “Even artists who are typically described as having broken through the internet, the Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, or Sandi Thom, all ended up combining with conventional record labels.” The IFPI’s report says that there are more than 4,000 artists on major record label rosters, with thousands more on independents. Around one in four of these artists were signed in the last 12 months. The report points out that, in the UK, record labels spend 23% of their total revenue on A&R (the average worldwide is 16%), comparing that to the pharmaceutical industry, which spends 15% on research and development.
Mike Smith, the MD of Columbia Records, comes from a music publishing background and said he had no idea how much it costs to break an artist before he started working for a record label. “It costs us £10k-£20k for our artist to perform on The X Factor – up to £100k for them performing on the Brits.” He says that retail value dropping by 40%, piracy and a la carte downloading has forced the label to work a lot smarter. How? By signing better artists, he says. “You have to overcompensate for average artists. With good artists you don’t have to buy expensive advertising.” He claims this has brought the hit rate of signed artists down from 1 in 10 to 1 in 4. “Our job is to reduce the random element to a minimum.”
According to the report, called Investing In Music, breaking a UK or US pop artist typically costs more than $1m (£660,000): $200,000 for artist advance, $200,000 for recording costs, $200,000 for three videos, $100,000 for tour support and $300,000 for promotion and marketing. Both Kennedy and Smith says this is a conservative figure. It’s not only pop artists that need tour support. Dickon Stainer of Decca Records says that his label spent £1m on tour support for jazz artist Melody Gardot to break her globally. Yes, investing in new talent is a hugely risky business, a fact Guy Hands can surely now testify to. “It takes a lot of money and a lot of balls,” says Kennedy. This is why record labels need to have multi-album deals to allow a return on their investment, states the report.
As much as the anti-label crusaders paint a very black-and-white picture, unfortunately, so does this IFPI report. Both parties seem to ignore facts in an effort to fight their corner. One side says that record labels became obsolete when recording gear became affordable for the bedroom musician and with the invention of social networking sites. They also claim that touring and merchandising will be how future artist will make a living and pay for recordings. This ignores the fact that there are literally millions of acts on MySpace and that, for the majority of artists, it actually costs money to tour. The IFPI report quotes Nina Persson, lead singer of the Cardigans and A Camp, saying: “It would be very difficult for me to have made a living just from live music. I would have to travel alone with a guitar and no band or crew to make that work.”
The record label side uses international pop stars as examples to illustrate the cost and commitment it takes to develop a successful career. The truth lies somewhere in between. This, as artist manager Jon Webster (CEO of the Music Managers Forum) points out, is an issue that can’t be subject to generalisation. A niche singer/songwriter would most likely cost a lot less in terms of touring. Today, a business-savvy artist can make a decent living, though spending a vast amount of time on the internet to develop and sustain a hands-on career takes a lot of time; time that should, one can argue, be used to practice and write songs.
Yes, good record labels still supply a service that venture capitalists don’t. Good A&R people will push artists to write better songs. They provide promotion and marketing teams with contacts and experience, which, along with advances, allows the artist to focus on the music. But the IFPI report omits to mention that their investment comes at a pretty high price (though, notably, it only does so if the artist becomes successful). One could say that it’s a loan with a very high interest rate. The report states that the advance is recoupable from an artist’s sales, but fails to acknowledge that much of the other costs often are, too. Tour support is sometimes recouped from merchandising. A manager I spoke to said his band’s major label refused to provide £20k in tour support (a lot less than the £100k mentioned in the IFPI report) unless they received 50% of all merchandise for the length of the rest of the contract. The band chose to borrow money from their parents to cover the bill instead. If a label decides to spend money on TV advertising campaign for a record, they’ll often recoup that cost from the artist – either by adding 50% of the cost to the artist’s “recoupment bill” or by reducing the royalty rate due to the artist for the record by 50% for a whole year.
The manager of a big international pop star (who wants to remain anonymous for this piece), who has signed to a major, says that his biggest wish is that the artist/record label relationship becomes a partnership in the future. Today, he says, there’s a tangible lack of trust. The fact that artists now have a choice of not signing a record deal will, hopefully, make record labels operate in a much more transparent manner.
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Pink Floyd score victory for the concept album in court battle over ringtones
Mar 11th
EMI told not to sell single tracks as downloads in ruling which could mean further losses for music label
Pink Floyd, the British rock group behind platinum-selling albums The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall, today secured a legal victory for the much-maligned genre of the concept album against the apparently inexorable march of the instant pop download.
In a high court ruling that led the band’s fans to proclaim a victory for their heroes’ artistic integrity over the forces of commercial exploitation, a judge ruled that EMI can no longer sell the songs from any Pink Floyd albums as single downloads or mobile phone ringtones.
After a case brought by the band’s surviving members, Roger Waters, David Gilmour and Nick Mason, the high court chancellor, Sir Andrew Morritt, said the label must adhere to a clause in its contract with the group intended to “preserve the artistic integrity of the albums” which prevented the unbundling of Pink Floyd’s records.
Pink Floyd became one of the biggest rock bands in history with their elaborate and experimental concept albums and highly theatrical live tours. EMI had argued that its deal with the band, reaffirmed in 1999 before the download market took off, related to physical CDs and DVDs but not to online distribution.
Pink Floyd alleged, and EMI agreed, that the label had allowed online downloads from the albums and allowed parts of tracks to be used as ringtones despite the clause which “expressly prohibits” EMI from selling songs out of context.
The judge granted the band the declaration they sought – that the contract means EMI is not entitled to exploit recordings by online distribution or by any other means other than the complete original album without Pink Floyd’s consent.
“This is great for a band who are the masters of the concept album,” said Matthew Johns, who runs Brain Damage, a dedicated Pink Floyd fan site. “Their music is unlike most other artists and listening to a whole album can be an immersive experience if you get into the concepts.”
Generations of young people have, like Johns, pulled the curtains and turned down the lights to listen to the whole 43 minutes of 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon, in which tracks merge seamlessly, exploring themes of conflict, greed and the passage of time. Each side is a single piece, beginning and ending with a fading heartbeat. It sold an estimated 45 million copies.
The verdict means the band’s music may now have to be taken down from the iTunes online music store which requires that album tracks are for sale individually.
It could mean a further loss of revenue for EMI, which releases recordings for Coldplay and Kylie Minogue but last year posted a £1.75bn loss. Its chief executive, Elio Leoni-Sceti, this week announced his resignation and former ITV boss Charles Allen will take control of its music business.
Yesterday’s verdict is thought to be the first time a band have successfully taken their record label to court over the way it has distributed their music online. It could lead to other cases, music industry analysts believe.
Robert Howe QC, representing Pink Floyd, argued that it would have been “a very odd result” if members of Pink Floyd were able to control exactly how their music was sold as a physical product but there was “a free-for-all with no limitation on online distribution”.Elizabeth Jones QC, appearing for EMI, disagreed and said the word record “plainly applies to the physical thing – there is nothing to suggest it applies to online distribution”.
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Controversial digital economy bill amendment follows lobbyists’ draft
Mar 11th
Text added to digital economy bill that could block sites such as YouTube echoes almost word for word a suggestion from the BPI
A controversial amendment to the digital economy bill that could block sites such as YouTube is copied almost word-for-word from a draft written by the BPI, which lobbies on behalf of the British music industry.
The BPI confirmed on Thursday that it drafted a letter which was circulated to government and opposition peers containing a suggested draft amendment to the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patent Act. Earlier this month the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Clement-Jones added the text into the digital economy bill almost exactly as provided as part of amendment 120a.
However, the suggested changes – which won approval from peers and will now be considered by the House of Commons – have come under fire from the heads of the four biggest internet service providers in the UK, as well as the UK chiefs of companies including Google, eBay and Yahoo, who said yesterday that they threatened freedom of speech and could lead to British websites being blocked without due judicial process.
In response, the BPI said that the amendment a “clear and sensible” way to deal with illegal downloading – but not that it had been the source of the draft version.
Today a spokesman for the BPI insisted that the organisation was not embarrassed at the disclosure of the source of the amendment.
“This was a suggestion that we made to the government in 2009, with this wording. This version of the proposal was sent to the government and also to the opposition parties. The government decided it wanted to go a different way. The opposition parties, while not fully agreeing with it, saw it as a good framework for what they wanted to put down,” the spokesman said. “We have consistently said that the digital economy bill should have sensible measures to deal with peer-to-peer file sharing.”
The BPI’s proposed amendment, in a letter dated 8 January, is almost identical to the version put forward by Lord Clement-Jones on 3 March. The key difference is the addition in Clement-Jones’s version of questions about national security, and of tests to see whether the blocking of a site infringes human rights and freedom of speech, and whether an ISP has tried to “facilitate legal access to content”.
Jim Killock, head of the Open Rights Group, a pressure group on digital rights which opposes the amendment, said that it was understandable that a lobby group such as the BPI would try to draft legislation – but that the Lords were at fault for not querying the source and intention of the amendment more closely.
“The BPI has got every right to do this,” said Killock. “The question is why the politicians have said in such a complicated arena that they will take the BPI’s ideas wholesale without consulting anybody else.”
Killock said that ORG, Consumer Focus and Liberty had all provided draft legislation and notes to politicians for the bill – but that theirs took the form of “probing amendments”, whose purpose was to show weaknesses in the draft bill which could then be revised.
“It’s the politicians who have been irresponsible here. It shows that they’re taking the BPI far too seriously,” Killock said.
The BPI spokesman responded: ” We made a proposal on this – and as is quite common – used statutory language to convey our point. This is something that all sides in the digital economy debate do.” He defended the addition of the amendment to the draft bill: “[the peers] made changes to our proposal which was then tabled by them, debated fully in the House of Lords, before being agreed and made part of the bill.”
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Pink Floyd win high court battle to stop EMI selling singles
Mar 11th
Band objected to label providing downloads of individual songs from concept albums that were created as a single work
Pink Floyd have today won a high court battle to stop record company EMI selling single downloads from their concept albums.
The judge has yet to rule on how much EMI now owes the band but the label was ordered to pay Pink Floyd’s costs, which are estimated at £60,000.
Chancellor Sir Andrew Morritt accepted arguments by the group that EMI was bound by a contract forbidding it to sell its records other than as complete albums without written consent.
Pink Floyd alleged – and EMI agreed – that it had allowed online downloads from the albums and had allowed parts of tracks to be used as ringtones.
Pink Floyd are known for their conceptual albums in which individual songs often merge with others to form larger “song suites”. The band argued that their music should only ever be heard as part of the full-length albums in which they originally appeared. They pointed to a contract signed in 1999 that stated their music could not be “unbundled” from its original context.
EMI’s lawyers argued that this contract, which was signed before the emergence of digital music stores such as iTunes, referred to “records” and did not apply to online sales.
But the judge sided with the band, noting that the contract was designed to “preserve the artistic integrity of the albums”.
Lawyers said it was the first time such a dispute between artists and their record companies had been heard in private.
Pink Floyd were pioneers of the long player format, with their 1973 prog-rock classic The Dark Side of the Moon notching up 35m worldwide sales.
The ban signed with EMI in 1967 and became one of its most lucrative signings, their back catalogue being outsold only by that of The Beatles.
Roger Waters, who co-founded the band with Syd Barrett, Richard Wright and Nick Mason, has a fortune estimated at £85m, according to the Sunday Times Rich List. The band last played together at London’s Live 8 concert in 2005.
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Pinoy fans rock to ‘Paramore’ hits
Mar 11th
MANILA, Philippines – Thousands of Filipino fans rocked the night away on Tuesday as the American emo-rock band "Paramore" held their first Philippine concert at the SM Mall of Asia concert grounds.
The band rose to fame with their hit song "Decode," which is the soundtrack for the vampire flick "Twilight".
Filipino fans sang [...]
Same old song at EMI?
Mar 10th
Charles Allen seems a surprising replacement for Elio Leoni-Sceti but at least he wants to be there
Who is this exciting breakthrough act promising to “focus on creativity” and deliver a “digital platform” as chief executive of EMI Music? It can’t be. It is. It’s Charles Allen, whose past digital offerings included OnDigital (RIP) and Friends Reunited. Nor were many of his ITV shareholders overly impressed by the creative output in those days.
On the plus side, Allen is the man on the spot (he was already non-executive chairman of EMI Music) and he tends to stick around in a crisis, which is exactly where EMI finds itself.
Elio Leoni-Sceti, the departing chief executive, is leaving eight weeks before EMI Music presents a business plan to its parent, the private equity firm Terra Firma. The quality of this plan is meant to determine whether Guy Hands of Terra Firma will approach his investors for another £120m to prevent EMI breaching its banking covenants, an act that might cause the lender, Citigroup, to seize control.
It’s an odd moment, then, for Leoni-Sceti to declare that “my job here is now done”. He sings a very different tune in a lengthy interview in Management Today. “I’m staying focused on delivering a vision for this business – I’m very dedicated to EMI,” he tells the magazine. Before they hand over £120m, Terra Firma’s investors might care to press Hands for a full explanation.
Alternatively, they could reflect that a volunteer is worth two pressed men – Allen does sound terribly pleased to be a headline act again.
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Elgar’s removal from the £20 note is a muscial loss to my wallet
Mar 10th
So a score will no longer bear the composer’s face. Adam Smith is no substitute – so how about Sid Vicious?
Poor old Elgar. If it’s not enough that Schoenberg has been discovered using his tunes as counterpoint exercises, his fizzer is about to be removed from the face of the £20 note, and any bill bearing his moustachioed countenance will no longer be legal tender after June 30. Worse, he only managed 11 years of monetary magnificence, compared with 23 for Shakespeare, one of his predecessors. Who knows how long Adam Smith, his replacement who started appearing in our wallets three years ago, will last in these economically straitened times? Perhaps staring at Smith’s periwigged pomposity and a wee slogan of capitalist efficiency (“The division of labour in pin manufacturing … “) will help us through the recession better than looking at Elgar and nostalgically dreaming of the Cello Concerto and the Malverns.
But it’s a shame there’s currently no musical presence on any of the Bank of England’s legal tender. There are other compositional candidates for the £20 note in the future: what about Purcell or Parry, Tallis or Tippett, Britten or Bax? Or for a truly radical gesture, imagine a £20 note with Her Maj on one side and Sid Vicious on the other. Anyway: I’m keeping at least one Elgarian 20 as a reminder of a time when I could find Sir Edward in my wallet as well as on my iPod.
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Charles Allen to run EMI’s music business
Mar 10th
Former ITV boss to become executive chairman as troubled firm prepares last-ditch bid to raise £100m from investors
Former ITV boss Charles Allen is taking control of EMI’s music business, home to acts including Coldplay and Robbie Williams, after the surprise departure of chief executive Elio Leoni-Sceti.
Leoni-Sceti will be leaving the troubled company at the end of March after just 18 months with the firm. His departure comes at a critical time for EMI, as the cash-strapped business puts the finishing touches to a new business plan which its private equity owners can present to investors.
Allen, who joined EMI as a non-executive director in January 2009, will become executive chairman of the music company. EMI Music Publishing will continue to be run by chairman and chief executive Roger Faxon. Allen’s previous experience at ITV, which he created by merging Granada with Carlton Communications, is likely to increase speculation that EMI is being lined up for a merger with Warner Music.
EMI was bought by Terra Firma, run by City financier Guy Hands, for £4.2bn in 2007 but has run into severe problems, with key acts defecting and profits crashing. The company has suffered turbulent relations with some of its top acts, most recently ending up in court with Pink Floyd and plunged £1.75bn into the red last year. Crucially, unless Terra Firma can find more than £100m from investors to satisfy the terms of its loan from Citigroup, the bank which advised the private equity firm on the buyout and provided the lion’s share of the funding, EMI will end up in the hands of its banks.
Leoni-Sceti, a former executive with consumer products group Reckitt Benckiser, was asked to come up with a plan that would persuade investors to get involved. That business plan is due to be presented and new money raised by the end of June. But Leoni-Sceti said today: “My job here is now done and it is time for me to move on.”
Allen said he had been closely involved in the creation of the company’s new business plan. “Elio and I have worked together for the last 14 months and he has decided that he has done what he came to do,” he said.
He said that new business plan would be “very much an extension of things we have been doing”, adding: “If you look at what Terra Firma did, they came in and rationalised the cost base and we have continued to tighten the business. But more importantly what you have now got is a real focus on how do we drive new music, a focus on hits. These things do not happen overnight, you have to nurture new talent but the early signs are pretty positive.”
“The problem, the issue, is getting our message through. This is a good company with good people, we have got more to do but we are on track to deliver. We have a challenged cost structure.”
But the storm clouds keep gathering over the business. Terra Firma is currently locked in a bitter legal fight with Citigroup, claiming the bank tricked it into offering too much for EMI by failing to inform it that other potential buyers had pulled out. A US judge will rule by the end of the month whether the case will be heard in the US or UK.
Allen said: “Would it be better if that wasn’t there? Yes, but the team have got their heads down and just got on with it.”
Hands made headlines when he bought the business, as a result of his at times heavy-handed dealings with artists. Since then the new management at EMI has been building bridges. Asked whether he would be involved in dealing with EMI’s artists, Allen said he had already been meeting them. “I have spent a lot of time with the talent and the management,” he said. “It’s like ITV. Would you deal with Simon Cowell or Ant and Dec as chief executive? Yes you would. Here you would be dealing with Robbie Williams or Lily Allen or whoever.”
One of the key acts that Allen will have to charm is Coldplay. The band’s next album is rumoured to be the last under the existing deal with EMI, although last month the band’s frontman, Chris Martin, said the band was “signed for a lot”.
“I think there is a good relationship with Coldplay,” Allen added. “They are really talented and really focused and great to work with. The team they deal with on a day-to-day basis is the team that’s there delivering for them.”
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The demise of the music industry is visible everywhere but in the facts
Mar 12th
Posted by Victor Keegan in Business
No comments
If music executives sold bottled water, they’d be calling for a ban on tapwater downloads. But their industry is proving resilient
Illegal downloads continue to be a cause of Armageddon within the music industry and a source of endless fascination outside. Business leaders still regularly moan that illegal downloads are destroying their livelihood, especially if representatives of government are within hearing range. At the first Music 4.5 conference in London last week, speakers took it as read that “kids are not buying music anymore” and that they must look elsewhere for revenues. Evidence of the demise of purchased music is everywhere to be seen, except for one place: the statistics.
In fact it is easier to make the case that the music industry, far from imploding, is one of the great success stories of the recession. The most dramatic example of this is in what kids are supposed not to be buying any more: single tracks. Last year sales of singles soared to an all-time record of 152.7m units, an astonishing 33% rise in a year when the whole economy (GDP) contracted by 3.3%. If the music pundits seriously think that these are not being bought by kids, then it shows how out of touch they are with their customers. These same youngsters who were – and probably still are – massively downloading free music from the internet were prepared to pay up to £3 a pop for an insipid ringtone (interestingly, not included on the industry’s statistics unless they are full-track ones). Why? Because there is an easy payment system on phones which didn’t exist on the web. Now there is an easy payment system (iTunes et al) on the web they are starting to pay again. If the big music companies had spent their energies dreaming up a payments mechanism for web downloads instead of suing their customers they could have swept all before them. Instead they were like the crew of a sinking boat that blames the sea instead of trying to mend the leak. If they were in the bottled water industry, they would probably be urging the government to stop free downloads of tap water at home as unfair competition. Yet the bottled water industry should have been their model. It got away with charging us lots of money for a product that was no better than free tapwater through clever marketing.
Even now practically everyone I meet from the music industry protests that it couldn’t be expected to combat the technological disruption that was eroding its traditional model. What piffle. Lots of books have been written about disruptive technologies. They can’t say they weren’t warned. As it turned out, pretty well every system for monetising music – iTunes, Spotify, We7, Shazam, Nokia’s Comes with Music et al – has come from outside the industry. What a missed opportunity.
Sales of singles are, of course, only one part of the industry. There has, unsurprisingly, been a fall in sales of albums – down from 133.6m units to 128.9m last year, not helped by the closure of key UK retail chains Zavvi and Woolworths – but that was more than offset by growth elsewhere in sponsorship, live shows and merchandising where there is something of a boom happening in Britain. Overall, the music industry grew by an amazing 4.7% in recession-ridden 2008, according to PRS for Music, and will probably be resilient when the full 2009 figures come in. A key fact is that last year income from live music overtook that from recorded music for the first time. Don’t think tracks, think music.
Clearly, the industry is changing. Consumers can now buy the singles they want without being locked into buying albums containing other tracks they don’t want. That may bring in less income but it is the gateway to other revenues. The people who allegedly won’t pay for downloads will pay huge sums to hear their favourite artists live or be part of the merchandising experience. Maybe illegal downloads – which, needless to say, I don’t approve of – should be looked on as a massive crowd-sourced marketing operation to generate money for gigs, memorabilia and future sales.
The future lies in capitalising on the whole musical experience, as the admirable Music 4.5 initiative well knows: it seeks to bring together artists and entrepreneurs to plot the future. If the quality of the five-minute pitches made at the conference by budding businesses is anything to go by, the future is bright. I loved the way Songkick.com is moving beyond Last.fm by linking songs you and your friends like with information about the band’s past and present gigs, enabling you to talk about them after the show. MusicGlue offers free downloads in exchange for email addresses which, over time, will produce geographic patterns showing where there is a dense enough cluster of fans to justify a gig. CloseCallMusic encourages people to interact with live music as it happens, while TuneRights is trying to crowd-source the financing of records. Audiofuel, which matches music to your jogging beat, aims to be the new Ministry of Sound. I loved what Decibel is planning – to have a vast data base of meta tags so you can find out details of each member of the band: that Jimi Hendrix played as a session man on a Little Richard track, for instance. That is just the sort of value-added that will lure people away from free downloads. Nick Hornby would love it.
These were only some of the pitches made which suggest that the future of the industry may continue to reside in bottom-up initiatives rather than the top-down approach of the major labels. The music industry, to be fair, is still a very heavy investor as a new study shows, but it had better be alert if it doesn’t want to be upstaged even more. The sad fact is that around 90% of start-ups fail – but it is vital for future employment, as well as the health of the music industry that we spend money to find the winners. A revolution is under way.