Vinyl sales may have hit their highest level in the UK since 1991 but this is hardly a sign of what is to come. Indeed, a quick look through the top 10 vinyl albums of 2016 reveals that all but one of the artists were releasing music back in 1991! The exception is Amy Winehouse and she’s dead. The majority of the volume of vinyl sales is driven by nostalgic older music fans.
Not only is vinyl not the future (it was just 2.6% of sales in 2016), the big differences between the most popular vinyl, streaming, singles and album artists reveal just how fragmented the music business has become. Each of the top 10 charts (album sales, singles, top streaming artists, vinyl sales) almost reads as a standalone group of artists with remarkably little cross over. In fact, only 2 artists appear across streaming, singles and albums. None appear across all four charts.
As large volumes of older consumers switch to streaming (and Amazon should play a key role here) there will be more opportunity to join the dots. But do not mistake this simply as an opportunity to try to revive yesterday’s formats in today’s platforms. The album is clearly fading. According to MIDiA Research survey data, 68% of subscribers state that playlists are replacing albums for them. It is time to start investing though and effort in rethinking what album experiences should be in the digital era. And that conversation should have no bounds, everything should be on the table (number of tracks, street date vs continual updates, interactivity, changing content etc.).
2017: ‘The Start of Something Big’
This is the start of something big. It will involve engagement: not just tweets and likes and swipes, but thoughtful and creative social and political action too. It will involve realising that some things we’ve taken for granted – some semblance of truth in reporting, for example – can no longer be expected for free. If we want good reporting and good analysis, we’ll have to pay for it. That means MONEY: direct financial support for the publications and websites struggling to tell the non-corporate, non-establishment side of the story. In the same way if we want happy and creative children we need to take charge of education, not leave it to ideologues and bottom-liners. If we want social generosity, then we must pay our taxes and get rid of our tax havens. And if we want thoughtful politicians, we should stop supporting merely charismatic ones.
Inequality eats away at the heart of a society, breeding disdain, resentment, envy, suspicion, bullying, arrogance and callousness. If we want any decent kind of future we have to push away from that, and I think we’re starting to.
There’s so much to do, so many possibilities. 2017 should be a surprising year.
Hitting the Links: Chris Bell, Sci-Fi Buildings, Viva La Spicy Food
In short, and as part of our unpredictably recurring feature, here are five online articles I’ve enjoyed recently:
The Genius of Chris Bell, One of Rock’s Greatest Tragedies
Gradually fading out towards the end of “I Am The Cosmos,” Bell eerily repeats: “I’d really like to see you again.” He died just a few months after the single’s limited release on indie label Car Records in 1978, driving into a pole on the way home from a late night studio session.
The Sublime Sci-Fi Buildings That Communism Built
These are not your parents’ dour architecture monographs, complete with such entries as “On the problems of developing the center of Kishinev” or “Approaches to using the vernacular in Tashkent and Navoi” (real items from a 70s-era release) but are lavish, glossy, and handsome. One of these volumes was released in 2007, the rest date from within the last two years. What does this all mean?
It’s a fearful sight in a way, the Port of Long Beach, this endless, crushing vista of metal and dust, with not so much as a blade of grass to relieve the impression of an infinite, silent or clanking perpetual machine, of a global engine, of “global industry”; compare this to say, a view of Central Park, and you’ll feel you’ve landed in a nightmare scene out of Mordor (or Isengard, I guess).
Why Revolutionaries Love Spicy Food
The Soviet agent’s tender taste buds invited Mao’s mockery. “The food of the true revolutionary is the red pepper,” declared Mao. “And he who cannot endure red peppers is also unable to fight.’”
Where Did Son Of Bazerk Go Wrong?
This astonishing record sank more or less without trace. There are reasons for this – and some of them, with the benefit of hindsight, are teeth-looseningly obvious. Yet Bazerk, Bazerk, Bazerk is a record that still, 25 years on, sounds like it’s crash-landed on your stereo from some indeterminate and unknowable point a long way in the future.
Decoding the Age of Fear
Neil Strauss in Rolling Stone:
Around the globe, household wealth, longevity and education are on the rise, while violent crime and extreme poverty are down. In the U.S., life expectancy is higher than ever, our air is the cleanest it’s been in a decade, and despite a slight uptick last year, violent crime has been trending down since 1991. As reported in The Atlantic, 2015 was “the best year in history for the average human being.”
So how is it possible to be living in the safest time in human history, yet at the exact same time to be so scared?
Because, according to {The Culture of Fear author Barry} Glassner, “we are living in the most fearmongering time in human history. And the main reason for this is that there’s a lot of power and money available to individuals and organizations who can perpetuate these fears.”
Inherent in the ways the news is both reported and received are a number of biases that guarantee people are not informed, but rather misinformed. The first problem with the news is that it must be new. Generally, events that are both aberrations from the norm and spectacular enough to attract attention are reported, such as terrorist attacks, mass shootings and plane crashes.
But far more prolific, and thus even less news-worthy, are the 117 suicides in the U.S. each day (in comparison with 43 murders), the 129 deaths from accidental drug overdoses, and the 96 people dying a day in automobile accidents (27 of whom aren’t wearing seat belts, not to mention the unspecified amount driving distracted). Add to these the 1,315 deaths each day due to smoking, the 890 related to obesity, and all the other preventable deaths from strokes, heart attacks and liver disease, and the message is clear: The biggest thing you have to fear is not a terrorist or a shooter or a deadly home invasion. You are the biggest threat to your own safety.
It would make logical sense, then, that if Americans were really choosing politicians based on their own safety, they would vote for a candidate who stresses seat-belt campaigns, programs for psychological health to decrease suicide, and ways to reduce smoking, obesity, prescription-pill abuse, alcoholism, flu contagion and hospital-acquired infections.
But our fears are not logical.
I highly recommend reading the full article.
Vox:
A cognitive scientist and linguist, {Harvard psychology professor Steven} Pinker focused his study of human nature on our propensity for violence — and conversely, cooperation — in his 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. In the book, Pinker meticulously documented a steady decline in violence over the last several centuries, which he writes, “may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species.”
[Steven Pinker:} Pessimism can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. While we have to be realistic about changes both up and down in rates of violence, we have to remind ourselves that violence is a problem we can deal with, that we have dealt with, and what’s important is to look at it realistically. To keep track of when it goes up, when it goes down, and what causes it to go up and go down and do more of what causes it to go down. We know over the last couple of years that it has gone down, so we should figure out what we did to achieve that and do more of it.
Yes, 2016 was full of some awful news. Let’s not forget all the good stuff that happened in 2016, though. Can’t think of anything? This website will jog your memory.
The site, 2016.promo, is based on an article by Angus Hervey: 99 Reasons 2016 Was a Good Year. The site is a month-to-month list of positive, non-crappy headlines from 2016.
Chin up. Happy new year!
Streaming’s Two-Sided Effect on Downloads
From the beginning, one of the key software engineers at Spotify has been Ludvig Strigeus, the creator of uTorrent, so clearly the company already knew a lot about file-sharers. In the early days the company was fairly open about its aim to provide an alternative to piracy, but perhaps one of the earliest indications of growing success came when early invites were shared among users of private torrent sites.
“People that are pirating music and not paying for it, they are the ones we want on our platform. It’s important for us to be reaching these individuals that have never paid for music before in their life, and get them onto a service that’s legal and gives money back to the rights holders,” {Spotify Australia managing director Kate} Vale said.
Of course, hardcore pirates aren’t always easily encouraged to part with their cash, so Spotify needed an equivalent to the no-cost approach of many torrent sites. That is still being achieved today via its ad-supported entry level, {General Counsel of Spotify Horacio} Gutierrez says. “I think one just has to look at data to recognize that the freemium model for online music consumption works.”
Spotify’s general counsel {also} says that the company is enjoying success, not only by bringing pirates onboard, but also by converting them to premium customers via a formula that benefits everyone in the industry.
The digital download, ushered in to the mass market more than a decade ago by Apple’s iTunes music store, is in rapid decline as people shift to streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music.
So how much longer do downloads have? A few years and they’re dead, says Mark Mulligan, music analyst at Midia Consulting: “It’s going to die before the CD. The CD has a fairly universal player, where there’s always at least one in a house. And the people who grew up buying CDs are the older music consumers – the CD will literally die out only when they do.”
“There’s no end date … our music iTunes business is doing very well,” Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice-president of internet software and services, told Billboard magazine in June. “Downloads weren’t growing, and certainly are not going to grow again, but it’s not declining anywhere near as fast as any of them [in record labels] predicted. There are a lot of people who download music and are happy with it and they’re not moving towards subscriptions.”
But in the long run, streaming is the only game in town – along, perhaps, with the CD and vinyl. The download once looked like the future; now, the question is how much more of a future it has.
The Gatekeepers of Streaming’s Long Tail
Digitization has brought new strategic challenges, and falling revenue, to the industry. Yet it has also brought new opportunities to a wider variety of artists. By reducing search costs, the digitization of music makes it easier to discover new artists and albums. It is {also} less costly to release new music, leading to unpredictable successes from artists who might not have been discovered or produced an album in an earlier era.
With subscription pricing and the ability to easily skip among artists (as opposed to per-album or per-song charges, which were the norm), streaming pushes users to listen to explore new artists. This has the potential to reduce the concentration of the very top artists and albums, while also helping music lovers find what economists refer to as the “long tail” of the industry.
“Spotify has democratised the universe,” is the dramatic, understandably Spotify-centric view of Spotify’s George Ergatoudis, who joined the service this year after a decade as pop’s most powerful tastemaker at BBC Radio 1. “One of our editors can find something, believe in it, put it in a playlist, see an interesting result from the audience then accelerate the song.” Systems inside Spotify automatically create playlists of what Ergatoudis describes as “emerging stories” (songs) which editors then trawl through when they’re compiling the playlists vital in achieving true hugeness. “There’s a lot of human curation time spent on saying, ‘Right, there’s some noise there, but what do we think about it editorially?’” Ergatoudis says.
It’s reassuring that discovery isn’t left entirely to algorithms, but this editorial aspect creates another question. Namely: has streaming liberated new artists from the constraints of regimented radio playlists and the whims of ego-crazed music critics, only to replace that system with a different set of gatekeepers? “The term ‘gatekeeper’ assumes we’re blocking something worthy coming through,” Ergatoudis insists. “I’d argue we’re not doing that. We’re letting good stuff through, and amplifying it.”
Ergatoudis argues that the gate being kept is now an extremely large one, or perhaps a load of different gates, through which different artists can pass. Demographics differ from service to service – Apple Music and Tidal skew urban – but as streaming services aren’t restricted by hours in a day, like mainstream radio stations, we’re looking at the possibility of multiple concurrent musical zeitgeists. For the first time, something like the UK’s long-trumpeted guitar-music resurgence wouldn’t have to come at the expense or, say, grime’s increasing popularity.
Trevor Horn: Digital Sampling with a Sense of Humor
Thanks so much to Jaco & Co. for turning me on to this fantastic three hour (!) conversation with production hero Trevor Horn:
Hearing Horn’s ’80s production work when it was new and still otherworldly had the hugest influence on me, as his sound transformed my teenage daydream goal of rock star to music producer. When I heard Frankie’s Welcome To The Pleasuredome (with its insane technical details in the CD liner notes), Propaganda’s A Secret Wish, and – especially – (Who’s Afraid Of) The Art Of Noise? I had to know exactly how these recordings were made. This led me down a rabbit hole that I’m still enjoyably descending.
Fondest memory of the time: via Art Of Noise, learning about this thing called a ‘digital sampler’ and then, mind blown, writing down a long list of all the household objects I would sample once I eventually acquired one. That record rewired my brain and the way I listened to everything around me. And, before you ask, I, unfortunately, have no idea what happened to that list.
One of my favorite parts of this conversation (hosted by Trevor Jackson who gets some delightful anecdotes out of his subject) is when Horn talks about his Fairlight CMI sampler, bought using “Video Killed The Radio Star” royalty. (An aside: this made me think how different music production history would be if that record hadn’t been a hit!) Horn reckons that he was the only prominent Fairlight owner who treated the device with a sense of humor, the other early UK Fairlight-ers being Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush. This was cool to hear as the fun and levity that Trevor Horn (and Fairlight engineer / Art Of Noise member J. J. Jeczalik) brought to sampling was one of my attractions to this work, and shaped how I approach my time in the studio. I think you can hear this in my own music.
Trevor Jackson’s musical selections in this show lean toward rare remixes from the period and it’s fascinating how prescient they were, and how Horn somewhat humbly downplays their brilliance. I was reminded of this stunning (and, yes, humorous) 1986 remix of Frankie’s “Rage Hard” which I hadn’t heard since it was relatively new, and I’d totally forgotten about it:
‘Independents Are Front and Centre’
Check out this lengthy interview with Merlin BV CEO Charles Caldas on [PIAS]’s fine blog, worth reading in full. A couple of excerpts:
[PIAS]: Did Spotify save the music business?
Charles Caldas: I don’t really subscribe to the ‘silver bullet’ view of the music industry. But Spotify’s certainly led the way to helping people to understand that there are different ways to monetise these rights. They showed you could marry those disruptive technologies with real commercial opportunities – not just threats.
Now if you look at the value Apple Music, Amazon and Google Play is bringing into the streaming business, you’re starting to see that’s shaping what the future of the business will look like.
[PIAS]: A lot of people are saying streaming isn’t mainstream yet.
Charles Caldas: That’s an important point. When I was younger, I was trying to sell records into HMV in Australia which was the epitome of the mainstream retailer. Let’s be generous and say there were 10,000 titles in that store. If you weren’t in those 10,000 titles you were invisible to the people in that store.
Now, the mainstream is whatever is on the services – every bit of music ever released. That’s why independents are front and centre in the market today. We’re not relegated to the specialist retailers or to the back of the shop.
Look into it from a consumer point of view: you can come into an environment like Spotify and what you’re discovering is no longer limited to what you hear on the radio, saw on television or read about in the press.
What we call over-indexing today is to me the rightful performance of independent music in the marketplace. The days of ‘if only the record store would stock this record’ have gone.
Eno Achieves the Endless
“Recordings – whether vinyl, cassette or CD – are limited in length, and replay identically each time you listen to them. So in the past I was limited to making the systems which make the music, but then recording 30 minutes or an hour and releasing that. ‘Reflection’ in its album form – on vinyl or CD – is like this. But the app by which ‘Reflection’ is produced is not restricted: it creates an endless and endlessly changing version of the piece of music”.
Brian Eno has revealed that his new album, ‘Reflection’, will see him achieve a long held goal to create an ambient record that does not end.
As well as releases in time-limited standard formats, the album will be available through apps for iOS and Apple TV on which the music on the record will play endlessly until the sun explodes and destroys all evidence of the human race having ever existed. Either that or until you get bored and turn it off. Whichever comes first.
Reflection is released on January 1. In the meantime, this video from Pitchfork spotlights a previously time-constrained Eno:
DJ Shadow Dissects “Mutual Slump”
The often excellent Song Exploder podcast has dropped an episode featuring DJ Shadow pulling apart his seminal 1996 track “Mutual Slump”:
It’s difficult to overstate just how much of a creative gut-punch DJ Shadow’s early recordings were to those of us producing electronic music at the time. I remember how the pre-Entroducing singles on Mo’Wax – such as “Lost & Found (S.F.L.)” – totally blew my mind and forced me to raise my studio game. I know I wasn’t alone.
I met Josh Davis / DJ Shadow at a record show in Austin in the early 2000s before one of my gigs. After introducing myself he laughed and said, “ohhh, now I know what my friend meant when he told me DJ Q-Bert was in town.”
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