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Thoughts on File Sharing – an addendum

Via the very wonderful Andrew Collins blog, I’ve just found out that there’s a 45p admin fee for the Radiohead album, so added the following edit in the middle of the previous post –

[EDIT – they’re also, crucially, charging a 45p admin fee. Crucial because it covers their costs of hosting and download, and also perhaps even more so because YOU HAVE TO PUT YOUR CARD DETAILS IN… actually I’m going to go and write a new post about this…]

Let me expand on the bit about card details a little, as it pertains to online sales. Online sales patterns are definied entirely by ease of use. The more clicks and details people have to put in, the more people fall away part way through the process. My shop application is terrible for this, because it requires you to take, ooh, about 90 seconds to get through to the checkout. That, in the world of the interwebs, is about 70 seconds too long. I’m talking with various geek friends about creating a paypal only three click download store. My guess is that my download sales would at least quadruple, because for people who use their paypal account regularly (so the email and password filed auto-complete) it really would be three clicks to the download.

Zencart – the application I use for all this stuff – is really cool. It’s feature heavy, means I can have group discounts and free shipping over certain amounts and all kinds of fancy schmancy stuff. But because of all of that, it also requires a fair amount of info to run. If I knew more about PHP and could be bothered, I’d have transfered my entire site into it – it has the option to integrate with phpBB, the software that runs my forum, so I could’ve had a one-stop registration for mailing list, shop, forum, and made it much easier for peoples to interact and shop all in one (if you’re a musician thinking of a major redesign, and the person doing it knows php well, it’s worth considering!) I’ve seen a few sites that feature that level of integration, though they looked more bespoke than that.

But anyway, the point is, that Radiohead are getting people’s financial details is a really smart move, and also means that the difference between paying 45p for it (about 90c US) or paying £7 is one number change in the buying process. Vital in these click-lazy times.

Oh, and apparently, The Charlatans are giving away their new album via the XFM radio website. I wonder how much XFM are paying Alan McGee, who runs the bands label, Creation, for the right to host the tracks? Even if it’s the 45p admin fee that Radiohead are charging the public, you’re looking at a heck of a lot of very cheap publicity for the Charlatans, XFM and Creation Records with the media-hungry McGee at the helm. [EDIT, apparently they aren’t signed to Creation – Creation no longer exists! (nice one Steve, way to go with the up to date information) – they were/are signed to Sanctuary, and McGee is managing them… Same deal, given that he still needs to get paid for being their manager, but worth an edit… /]

McGee’s posit, that recorded music is now just a vehicle for getting people to gigs, is great for a band like the Charlatans, who’ve been around for close to 20 years and have a substantial live following. For smaller bands, or bands who’s style of music costs lots of time and money to make but doesn’t translate well to the live arena, it’s like handing them a P45 and saying ‘sorry, you’re no longer allowed to make money from this industry, go get a day job and muck about with fruityloops in your spare time…’ – less time to make music, less time to think about music, less energy and focus to produce music of substance.

BTW, I’m not suggesting that people with day-jobs can’t make great music! Even with the model as it is, it often liberates them from having to play music their don’t believe in in order to live, allowing them to focus on what really gets their creative juices flowing, however uncommercially viable. Cecil Taylor washed dishes through the 60s til he was finally able to make money playing the music he loved, Nels Cline was working in a record store til he joined Wilco a couple of years ago.

So we need to keep talking about this – where do we go from here? More comments?

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Thoughts on File Sharing…

Two things in the last day have got me thinking more about what is euphemistically referred to as ‘File Sharing’. Firstly, I was surfing the sites of musicians I knew to be really web-savvy in order to find what they are up to in the way of pushing information out to their fan-base. the first site I went to was Gary Willis‘ site, knowing Gary to have done web design work in the past. I didn’t really find much out to do with information dissemination (other than him not having an RSS feed for his blog), HOWEVER: the one post on his blog thus far is a brilliant rant about file sharing.

Then, today, the announcement was made that Radiohead’s new album would be released in 10 days time – initially only as a download, for which you can pay whatever you think it’s worth, to be followed by a mega-boxed set in December, which will apparently contain the CD, the vinyl version of the album, an extra CD of other songs, and a hard backed book, for £40.

Starting with the Willis piece, he basically explains why ‘file sharing’ is a stupid term for what he called ‘unpaid downloading’, looks at many of the excuses people give to justify taking music from file-sharing services (which now, apparently, account for 40% of all webtraffic) and pulls them apart from the indie musician’s point of view.

And it’s great, persuasive stuff, hopefully causing file-sharers that read it, and care at all about Gary Willis’ music to see that it’s not quite the victimless crime that it’s portrayed as.

But I’m torn. Torn on whether we need to keep fighting it in such a blunt way as writing blog posts about how we’re being ripped off (we are), whether we need to find other ways of changing the culture, or whether we need to accept the mindset and look for glimpses of light.

The Radiohead release is going to be possibly the most important release in the history of downloading music, for a number of reasons:

One, they aren’t actually giving it away. If you hear anyone saying that ‘Radiohead are giving away their new record’, please correct them. They are allowing the audience to decide what it’s worth. That’s a huge difference. [EDIT – they’re also, crucially, charging a 45p admin fee. Crucial because it covers their costs of hosting and download, and also perhaps even more so because YOU HAVE TO PUT YOUR CARD DETAILS IN… actually I’m going to go and write a new post about this…]

Two, they aren’t releasing the download and CD at the same time. What this stops is people circulating massively high resolution copies of the files via BitTorrent that music snobs can claim they have to download because they can’t get the CD (I have sympathies with people who want higher res. downloads, and am planning on adding .FLAC availability to the store soon, but it doesn’t excuse stealing music… I just hope Radiohead release their album at sensible quality…) It means that the only versions of those tracks in existence should be the ones they have released.

Three, they leave the boxed set til later, add more music an a book and the rarity factor as a hook for fans, and release something that generates a whole load more income from ‘the fans’ and gives people something that isn’t downloadable.

Four, they don’t put a fixed charge on the download, meaning that people can pay them a pound for it if they like, which is a pound more than they’d get from Bittorrent, and also cunningly makes people start thinking and having conversations about the value of music. Today, everyone’s been talking about it. Radiohead are still zeitgeist-y enough to generate the conversation in a way that someone tiny like me never could outside of the gorgeous people who post on my forum.

So what will the outcome be? Who knows. They could end up making nowt. It’s possible that the whole thing will backfire, and they’ll be left paying the bandwidth on a load of downloads that they are grossing 30p each for. I really don’t think that’ll be the case, but it’s possible.

The opposite could also be true; that they end up making a shed load on it because people will rise to the occasion, given enough room to be grown up and ethical, people may choose the right thing. The band will then make another killing on the boxed set, and the industry will be left reeling from a band without a deal making millions on very little hard cash outlay (clearly they’ve spent about a pound on the website, cos it’s horrible in a quirky psuedo-post-modern-trying-too-hard kind of way – surely all that text didn’t need to be graphic files – haven’t they heard of CSS?).

What does this mean for the little people – those of us who really aren’t in the position to order even a thousand units of a limited edition boxed set to accompany a release like that? I’ve been spending time and energy on making the CD packaging to my stuff attractive ever since my first album. I’ve never liked jewell cases, and have avoided them, going for something tactile, pretty and collectible. If you’ve got all 6 of my proper CD releases sat in a row on your shelf, they look pretty damned fine (I really should’ve decided on a uniform font for the spines at the start, but my design skills have definitely developed over the years… just don’t mention the Comic Sans on NDFC, I’m embarrassed enough about it already…)

But I still don’t sell anywhere near as many CDs as you’d expect for someone with my level of exposure etc. I get a fair few emails from people who are very familiar with what I do, who clearly haven’t bought the CDs (given that they have to get them from me, or at least from a source that reports back to me on who’s got it…) I’m sure some of you reading this have got copies of my albums from friends… I’m not going to berate you for it – I certainly can’t complain any more about people making illegal copies of my music that I can of anyone else’s. I own a handful of illegally owned copies of stuff, and a whole load of BitTorrent-acquired digital copies of things I’ve got on vinyl (on the assumption that it’s perfectly legal to own digitized copies of music you have on vinyl, or they wouldn’t be able to see USB turntables, no?)

And then today, I release my first download only album – the self-titled Calamateur Vs. Steve Lawson album. Calamateur AKA Andrew and I have jointly put it out, on both of our labels, and are kind of testing the water to see how sales go. It’s been up on iTunes for a couple of weeks, but it takes a couple of months to get any accurate reflection of sales from them. It’s been up on my site for day, but there were a few problems with the code on the site this morning (just cosmetic stuff, to do with the formatting of the text) so if you tried buying it them and got freaked out by the messed up screens, try again.

It’ll be interesting to see how it goes – it’s an album that both Andrew and I are hugely proud of, is clearly rather different from what I normally do, but there’s enough of me in there for it to be familiar to people who listen to what I normally put out. But will people buy the download version instead of a CD? I still sell way more CDs through the shop than I do downloads, though the downloads obviously picked up in popularity when I put the price of the Lessons Learned Cds down from £6 to £2.50 (feel free to go and buy them, they’re really rather fab).

So all eyes are on Radiohead, to see if we have a new model emerging for music sales. What needs to be said over and over again in the course of the dialogue on this stuff between musicians and audience is that

  • making music costs money
  • being really good at your instrument takes time
  • if you want great music, you have to be willing to financially invest in the ability of the musicians to spend the time needed to make great music and invest in the technology and technical help required to realise the great music that’s going on in their heads

Any notion that big record labels are putting up money from a limitless supply of cash for everyone to make records with needs to be nixed at the earliest possible moment. It just doesn’t happen like that, even for the bands on labels. I’ve known friends in bands with proper deals, playing arena shows (as the support act) and who were on prime-time TV shows, but were on a retainer of £700 a month.

Part of the mistake that indie musicians have made is to try and be taken seriously by looking like we’re on majors, like our labels have staff (I know quite a few indie musicians with fictitious staff – you know who you are! :o) ) and like we’re doing better financially than we are. Success breeds success, right? Wrong – these days, it breeds contempt, because success=majors=way too much money already=fine for studenty me to download cos I’ve got far less money than you. And that’s probably not how it is at all.

Your comments please, oh mighty peanut gallery of loveliness.

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ongoing blog tweaks…

Never having been one to leave well enough alone, the blog-tweaks are ever moving forward – this week i’ve added tag listings to the end of each entry (NB, if you click on a tag, you’ll get a list of other articles that feature that tag, and can even subscribe to an RSS feed for posts that just feature that tag… how cool is that?)

And today, i’ve added a list of ‘most recent comments’ to the side bar on the main page – feel free to join the discussion about any particular post!

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The invisible engine of music…

One of the great things about teaching bass is that questions, comments and observations from my students spark off trains of thought that get me reconsidering the nature of what we do as musicians, and obviously more specifically as bassists.

I was talking this morning with a student about the art of simple bass – the zen of bass – playing lines that on the surface are almost mind-numbingly simple, but thanks to the whole universe of intention that can exist in every note, can utterly define the song.

One of the examples we used was Nick Seymour of Crowded House. Neil Finn is a genius songwriter, truly one of the great songwriters of the last 20 years, IMHO. But what is it about Crowded House that stops them from sounding like a stadium emotional rock band? Largely, it comes down to two things – the production ideas of Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake, and the rhythm section of Nick Seymour on bass and the late and dearly missed Paul Hester – the production stuff adds tonnes of variety to the arrangements – guitar sounds popping up for two bars and then vanishing again, processed bits of voice and weirdness coming in and out. But the rhythm section do one really crucial thing that lots and lots of modern bands miss – they don’t play in the studio like they’re playing in an arena. One of the tragic things that happens to bands when they break into the arena-gig-world is that they start writing songs, and more importantly arranging songs, to fit in that environment. You only have to compare the first two Coldplay albums to hear the difference. The first Coldplay album is a gorgeous fragile intimate affair – sure, there’s plenty there that can be turned into flag-waving stadium bombast when required, but the record doesn’t sound remotely like that. The two albums that followed are both written for stadiums, and mastered for radio. They don’t make that distinction between tracks that sound great when played on your own at home and arrangements of those tracks that sound great in front of 40,000 people.

And in those arrangements, the first things to vanish are the intricacies and interest in the rhythm section – compare what Adam Clayton was doing on Unforgettable Fire with just about anything he’s done since…

It’s what I think of as ‘Journey Syndrome’ – writing songs for stadiums. It’s the death of subtlety. The stadium rock bands of the 80s did it, in those innocent irony-free days. Before them, bands seemed to be able to make it work. Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’ doesn’t sound like a stadium record, the 70s Aerosmith records don’t sound like Stadium records – they were just great records that translated well into that environment, but still worked at home. Crucially, they weren’t squashed into a 5dB dynamic range like so much unlistenable modern rock. It’s so depressing that the hundreds of bands around now trying desperately to sound like Talking Heads have missed the genius of the Talking Heads sound: Space. As Candy Flip told us in the early 90s. You Need Space. Talking Heads were all about Space. So many recent bands that I really like in principle are messed up by writing for arenas and mastering for radio. Muse, The Killers, Kaiser Chiefs. All largely unlistenable on record, unless you’re playing them on the really shitty little stereo in the kitchen or on laptop speakers. Muse and the Killers both mess up my theory about dull rhythm sections, in that they both have really cool bassists, though I haven’t heard the second Killers album, so need to give it a spin and see if they’ve gone the way of Coldplay…

Some bands never got what the bassist was for in the first place – for all their desperation to sound like The Beatles, Oasis had one of the shittest bassists ever to strap on the instrument in poor ole Guigsy. He really couldn’t play. As in Alec John Such level uselessness. Missing the vital point that one of the things that was most remarkable about the Beatles was that in the later years, Paul and Ringo were the UK end of a transatlantic axis that changed the world of rhythm sections for ever – the US end being the Funk Brothers at Motown. McCartney’s bassy stuff was integral to the sound and genius of the Beatles. Imagine Guigsy playing Penny Lane, Paperback Writer, Rain, Maxwell’s Silver Hammer etc… Again, Oasis’ obsession with being the world’s biggest band extended to them arranging their stuff to be sung on the terraces – where it does indeed sound amazing – but meant that they were never going to be artistically a sensible comparison with the Beatles, even as Beatles copyists…

For one great example of how a rhythm section can make or break a song, have a listen to the Fleetwood Mac original of Dreams, and then the Corrs remake. Andrea Corr has a lovely voice, and does a pretty nice version, albeit a carbon copy of the phrasing and shape of the original. But the utterly soulless anodyne arrangement of their version that loses all of the tension, space and human feel that made the whole of the Rumours album so good. The Corrs version is pretty much music for people that really don’t care about music. It’s good, it’s just not good. Music by committee. This isn’t meant to turn into a rant about the Corrs – gawd bless their freakishly perfect gene pool – more a word of caution to those of you in bands not to get caught up writing music for arenas, not to get obsessed with making your album as loud as it can possibly be. If you have to, do a super-compressed version to send to radio, just don’t make the rest of us suffer through it.

Last week, I witnessed an absolute masterclass in how to play bass in a stadium – the Police reunion show at Twickenham. For all his musical sins of recent years, Sting, in the context of the Police, is still one of the most imaginative, interesting and instantly recognisable rock bassists around… bizarre given that he’s playing lines that he wrote almost 30 years ago, which still sound fresher than 90% of what’s around today. The Police’s sound always had loads of space in it, in between Stewart Copeland’s out of time but full of energy drumming (still drifting all over the place tempo-wise, but crammed with that punkish drive that made them so compelling first time round) and Andy Summers spacey delay-drenched guitar parts (until he attempted an ill-advised jazz workout on, I think, So Lonely – not to put too fine a point on it, it was a disaster). Still, Sting and Copeland put on a show of just how defining a rhythm section can be if the musicians put their mind to it. Proper magic. (click here for my photos of the gig.)

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comments are go…

Hurrah, thanks to Sarda The Wondergeek, we have comments back! Let’s see how quickly I get spammed into oblivion now… get commenting, peoples, there are now nearly 1400 posts in the blog, so plenty to go back and rant about… :o)

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new look blog… well, new look to me anyway…

OK, this affects precisely none of you, but the lovely Sarda has just upgraded the blog software used here to the newest version of Moveable Type, so the blogging process looks completely different for me…

The biggest difference for you is that I’ve just switched comments back on, so feel free to trawl back through all the nonsense I’ve been typing over the last wee while and comment away… We’ll see how long it lasts before the spammers get round whatever security is in place…

have at it…

[edit – ah, I’ve just remembered that I’ve deleted the comment-related stuff from the index template… must replace that before you can comment… Doh!]

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improv fun on a restaurant gig

Had a most enjoyable gig this evening, with Luca Sirianni and Davide Giovannini – it was at Smolenski’s on the Strand, so was a restaurant gig – quite an upmarket restaurant gig, but people were still eating while we played in the background. Anyway, it’s Luca’s gig, but he’s pretty open with what we can do, so lots of lovely improv ensued, including a couple of things i hope I can still remember tomorrow cos they’ll turn into new tunes. Harmonically we’re able to get into some great places, as Luca tends to play quite high guitar parts, and has a clearer more trebley sound that most jazzers, which means that we can get away with being more ‘out’ without it really clashing. We did a mad version of Summertime to close the gig, which went all over the place, all with a rather lovely R ‘n’ B groove… much fun.

When i got home, I found in my inbox one of those lovely emails that really makes you think – it was from a musician friend I deeply admire and respect, taking me to task for being particularly uncharitable about Babyshambles in a post a few months back. His email was friendly and encouraged me to check out what the musicians in the band are up to, given that his experience of them has been really positive, both to listen to and play with… I like it when people throw things into the mix that mess with how I previously saw things. I find it very difficult to get past Doherty’s public persona and the nonsense of watching someone completely wasted trying to play – it’s bad enough when it’s someone you know is a genius, let alone when it’s someone who thus far has seemingly failed spectacularly to produce any art that justifies the level of exposure and interest he’s been getting… (I’m really glad that I’ve never seen any of the footage of when Coltrane used to be so spaced on Heroin that he would fall asleep on the bandstand, or John Martyn being so drunk he couldn’t stand up… As much as I’m aware of how geniuses are capable of ruining things with drugs, I generally find it too painful to watch – it always amazes me when bassists tell me they love the Jaco Pastorius tuitional video when to me it’s a heartbreakingly tragic document of a once-incredible musician failing to remember even the most iconic of his own compositions, and generally falling apart on screen. But once again, i digress). So anyway, as a result of my being irked by Doherty, and finding what I have heard of the band making no memorable impression on me whatsoever beyond sounding largely derivative, I hadn’t really listened in any great depth, given that there’s plenty of music that does connect with me that I could spend that time with, and nothing had previously given me cause to investigate.

But now it’s there, so next time something Babyshambles-ish comes up, I’ll give it a listen with fresh ears, and be less quick to dismiss what they do… I really hope there’s something there that grabs me – certainty in music isn’t really a quality I require or enjoy, and neither is disliking particular music – people who wear their distain for particular things like a badge of honour come across as unbearably smug, and I’ve nothing to gain by not liking or liking Babyshambles, so I’ll have another listen, at some point, and report back. For now though, I’ll take back my earlier blog comments about the band and reserve judgement (as if they give a shit what I think anyway… and neither should they!)

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And more retro-loveliness

OK, so I’m indulging the kind of retrogressive fanciful nonsense that I’ve derided before on this ‘ere blog (can’t find the entry at the moment, but it was a rant about oldies stations), but I’m really loving finding 80s classics on YouTube… I guess I can console myself that I’m digging up songs I really like, and still like, not Amytiville by Lovebug Starski or Just Say No by the Grange Hill Cast… I’m not even dipping into guilty pleasures like Hi Ho Silver by Jim Diamond (it’s the association with Boon, I’m afraid) or any of the great 80s power ballad duets from crap films…

So here’s installment 3 in Steve’s video nostalgia trek… I promise I’ll dig up some new music soon to counteract this pointless reminiscing.

BTW, there’s a thread started over in the forum – I’m sorry that comments are still down… Will try and stick pins in Sarda and get him working on it… it’s not like he’s actually busy with work and moving back to England or anything.

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Comments down…

Comments are down on this ‘ere blog at the moment. Problems caused by the scumbags who keep trying to spam it (the spam gets filtered, but it doesn’t stop them trying 100s of times a minute!)

So if you want to comment/discuss stuff on here, you’ll have to do it over in The forum – the new signup thing there is that you need to put the word ‘MODULUS’ in the space for the VIP code on the signup page. Another measure to stop spammers from signing up automatically…

see you over there…

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