Nonononoo. Don’t try and change my mind, I’m serious.
No I mean it. Honestly.
I’m going to try and set up a record label for the hQ release.
I know, I know.
But, right, here’s why...
So, yes. I’m going to try and set up a small record label type thing. Seeing as how I have an album coming out with hQ soon, and another album in the works for the Prog Band Currently With No Name, and also taking into account the fact that I have a year out in the industry next year, and I don’t have any specific plans regarding what to do, I’m going to attempt to be self employed next year, and if I can find a professional studio environment to work in, it will contribute valuable experience, (deep breath) the long and short of it is that the economic, social, and musical society as it is today is very accommodating of self reliant record labels, because of the ‘Indie revolution’, the online downloading trend, and the primarily digitised popular format of music today.
That was quite a hefty paragraph, so I’ll give you a minute.
Want a biscuit?
Mmmm.
To be honest, as I’ve kind of grown up in a generation where the music industry is ‘dying’ I’ve had a really good chance to watch it evolve, and you can visibly see the decline of the overly rigid record labels as they desperately try and claw some money from the drain that physical formats are circling.
I’m not saying CDs will die out. Far from it, but the fact of the matter is, that’s just not how we roll anymore. People are falling out of love with capitalism where they can help it, and when you look at it, it seems a crime for a financially struggling student to be shelling out hundreds of pounds into a multi-million dollar industry when he can safely spend that same amount of money on the equipment to make his own music. I have been in the situation where bands have broken up, or failed to get off the ground due to lack of funds for big enough amps or not having the money to hire a PA everytime they want to gig. And the unfortunate truth is that every penny that they save by ‘illegal’ downloading is another penny in the bank to fuel the next generation of Arctic Monkeys, or the next home studio based band like Tinyfish (or, dare I say it, hQ).
And so,
Inexorably,
Unavoidably,
And ultimately inevitably,
I come to a convenient crossover.
*Ahem*
Metallica suck.
Want another biscuit? This could take a while.
I’ll try and keep this brief and relevant, despite my temptation to blast them for all it’s worth. In the year 2000, a series of co-incidences involving a free download of one of their tracks lead Metallica to sue Napster (a p2p music downloading network) for approximately all that they were worth and as a result of their blind panic the company essentially declared bankruptcy in 2002.
Sorry, that was pretty childish.
Now, Napster was a company set up by one lone university student called Shawn Fanning, in an attempt to try and make the music industry less financially intimidating, and his company was even featured in Time magazine as one of the most successful modern business ventures for the younger generation. After this massive success he was cut down by a band, who already had millions more dollars than they could have possible needed, who felt it necessary to destroy a small business helping the public as it was causing them a small loss of capital. Fortunately, the story ends happily, as Shawn went on to develop several other programs, and has recently set up a new company called Path, which has attracted the attention of some of the people who work with Facebook.
Unfortunately, they didn’t stop there.
They then named 3 universities that they blamed for the online downloading boom, and threatened them with heavy lawsuits, and 2 of these universities were let off the hook, by blocking the Napster website from their campuses. However the one that did not was victimised, in a BIG way. The ‘most influential metal band of all time’ then hired an internet company to watch Napster over a period of 2 days and compiled a list of over 300,000 Napster users found downloading their songs and pressed to have them banned from the site.
Now, take a second to actually think about that thoroughly...
Metallica found out about the site and banned *only their own* fans.
That, to me, sounds like a pretty bad idea.
They alienated close to half a million fans. Word of that has spread and alienated half a million more. But in my opinion, it’s still not enough.
Nevertheless, this shows the blind unfaltering desperation that some record companies and certain worlds-worst-bands will be capable of in the near future as the industry continues to decline, it will get worse before it gets better.
However, this ‘decline’ is not a decline in the sales of music, simply a shift in the paradigm of acquiring it. As the sales of CDs have dwindled the numbers of people downloading have shot up in hugely disproportionate amounts. Overall then, the acquisition of music has far from suffered.
I’m deliberately avoiding publishing any kind of graph, by the way, so as to avoid this sounding and looking like an essay. I have this one, though...
Essentially what I’m saying is that the internet is quite possibly the best thing that has ever happened to music since les paul hooked an acoustic guitar up to a telephone microphone and played the first ever notes of electric rock and roll.
And here’s why:
In the old days, being signed as a band was the biggest thing that could possibly happen to you, and that was difficult because it had very little to do with how good you were. Granted, if you were amazing someone would have noticed and hunted you down, but the point is that it was more about who you knew, and luck, as to whether you got seen by the right people. Now, thankfully for the real talent in the industry, record companies have access to all bands through Myspace and Soundcloud and other such websites and therefore they don’t have to rely on bands they have been able to find, and can track down true musical talent. Arctic Monkeys were the first band to be internet poached, and it’s unlikely they would have been hailed as they were if it wasn’t for the internet. As well as scouting, it plays a huge part in distribution. iTunes is one of the best ways to get new music ‘out there’ as it were and it’s relatively easy to get a song or album on there.
It’s because of this boom that modern signed bands are arguably better than the bands of a previous generation, but I’ll leave that debate for another day. It also means that hQ will never get famous. We’re simply not good enough. But the day I see one of our albums in a shop, on a physical CD in HMV then I will know that we’re good enough to make me truly, genuinely happy.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that if we fight evolution, we’re no better than the creationists.
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