Musings on the industry, success, hype...
September 24
Image respectfully borrowed from http://www.marriedtothesea.com/ - awesome website, visit it now!
So, as I might have mentioned, it was my birthday on Friday. It's been happening more and more lately - I could swear they're about every 6 months or so now - and so it prompted a bit of a reflection. You know - all the usual stuff: where's my zimmer frame, why am I waking up in the middle of the street, where did my trousers get to. That type of thing.
It also got me thinking though, about the efforts I've had getting established in all this. It's nearly 5 (!) years after my first release with Baobinga. Since then we've tried plenty of things in our respective attempts to sustain successful careers in the dance music industry, some of which have been more useful than others.
It's been an interesting time, because the dynamic of the music industry has changed completely in that time. Web 2.0 has appeared and pretty much swept away the whole existing framework - and, if you ask me, made irrelevant the entire debate about filesharing. Which again, is interesting because it's only this week that Lily Allen has set up her filesharing/industry blog. (edit: and in fact even closed it again!) Oh well. You can't read it anymore, but there were loads of contributions from various folk like that tosser from Muse (who thinks that if you are a heavy user of the internet you're obviously a filesharer and definitely not just watching Strictly Come Dancing on the iPlayer, and therefore should pay more), that tosser from Keane, who thinks that ISPs are being lazy and greedy and should find a way to examine every file you download to see not just if it's an audio file, but also if it's an audio file that you don't have the appropriate rights to be accessing, but one that somehow doesn't invade your privacy (yes seriously), and a bunch of other tossers.
It strikes me that the horse has well and truly bolted on this one. I mean, who even fileshares these days anyway? What's the point when you can just download Spotify, and listen to anything you want, whenever you want (especially now you can 'take your playlist offline') or go on Youtube etc? I don't think I know anyone who downloads torrents or bothers to Soulseek now (in contrast to 5 years ago when everyone and his dog was at it), as it's a bit technical for many - but I know plenty of people who listen to a lot of music - legally, or at least semi-legally - without ever paying for any. No need to fill your HD when you can just stream owt.
(What concerns me more is that these legal alternatives seem to be no better for the artist - neither Youtube nor Spotify have ever made a profit, and don't seem to hand any money down either. They get plenty of investment money for their head dudes, but I don't know anyone who's received any money from them for the use of their music. Not to whinge here - obviously there are people getting millions of plays, who are further up the queue than us dance music producers - but since Youtube made the PRS sign a secret deal I guess we'll never know if and when people will be getting paid).
But I digress.
(pic from Alicia Berger)
So anyway, if you're an aspiring producer, you may as well forget about getting paid for writing music for now. Register with the PRS - if the likes of Mary-Ann Hobbs picks up on one of your tracks you might get 50 quid at the end of the year, so it's worth it, but it's not something you can bank on. When you've got some hype behind you, then maybe you can start asking for money up front for remixes and single advances.
It may have been the case a few years back that to release singles or an album on a decent label would pretty much set you up, get people's interest and bring the gigs rolling in. As I said in a previous blog though, that doesn't really hold any more. There are so many labels - physical labels, mp3 labels, free labels - that the cachet of having these releases isn't what it once was; it's getting ever harder to be heard above the crowd.
The main thing is that you're basically gonna struggle unless you've got that mystical quality of 'hype' going on. This is the holy grail; this is what gets you the DJ bookings, it's what gets you the remixes. You just need to figure out exactly how to generate it. Just releasing an album, or getting a feature in a big magazine, or on a popular blog, or hearing your track on Radio 1 - none of these things will do it on their own. They don't (really) generate hype, they reflect it.
One way, in fact the only cast-iron, guaranteed way, is to write amazing tunes. Tunes that change the game, which sets you as the head of a new subgenre. Joker has just done it, before him Rusko, Caspa, Herve and Sinden did it, before them Burial and Digital Mystikz... and so on. But that is rather obviously easier said than done. Then you've got people with gimmicks - people like Kissy Sell-Out who, despite his obvious talent, rapidly became as famous for taking an air horn on stage with him as for his tunes. And it's certainly clear (and indeed always has been) that the people with the best tracks or best production don't necessarily get the hype and the gigs - we've all got a favourite producer who never hit the heights they deserved (why isn't Toasty a platinum selling millionaire? There's no justice!). There's a lot more to it than that.
So what does work? Ah.
Besides writing the best tunes ever, I suppose persistence. You certainly have to spend a lot of time emailing, phoning, hassling people - magazine reviewers, blogs, promoters, labels, whatever. Most of them will probably ignore you, because they get a million mp3's a day or just plain don't like your stuff, so you need to keep at it. A lot (but trying not to be annoying with it!). Probably spend as much time on promotion as you do on actually writing tunes, I'd say. You also need to know people - people at magazines, radio stations, labels, wherever. There's an amazing amount of nepotism in the industry, so if you don't know these people, get to know them. Contrive to meet them, email them until they give in, do whatever - but these are the people you need to be speaking to, persuading them to do you a favour and so on. Maybe try to go round the side - start a clubnight or something, where you'll get to meet people that way.
DJ mixes are OK to an extent, but people are pretty flooded with them these days; just look at this blog for instance, we usually have one a day - so people don't take as much interest in them as they once did. Free tunes help too, but again, it's not the draw that it used to be - when people like TRG and dBridge are giving away free tracks, it makes it harder for the average Joe to get attention to their own. I've got to say, it sometimes feels like some kind of voluntary slavery - to get to the higher echelons, people lower down the chain usually have to work for free - offer to do free remixes, do some cheeky mashups and punt them out to blogs, play the warm up at the local clubnight. But then all the creative industries are like that - people doing unpaid internships at magazines or TV studios and whatnot. So it's kind of the way of things - but ultimately, if you put the work in at this level, you should get there eventually! It can be a long slog. But chin up...
If anyone comes up with a more efficient way of doing things, please let me know. Or add it in the comments. What do people reckon?
Oh and, er, check the new mix, eh?
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i.d.
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