What music companies don't get about the web

A lot of people writing on the web criticise music companies for their antiquated approach to managing digital rights, ie by trying to control them. 'Why can't it be free?' they ask, apparently unconcerned with the impact of such a change on the artists they profess to admire. Experiments in giving away material for free have had an uneven history: Prince is presumably happy to have sold out his O2 concerts on the back of handing out his CD, but Radiohead are less sure. But as long as music companies exist and artists hope to make a living from their creative content, making stuff free can only be a tactical gimmick rather than standard policy. So, perhaps against the conventional wisdom, I would say that music companies are right to be worried about copyright evasion on the internet, right to attempt to prevent it, and right to take action against those who facilitate it.

Which is not to say that I think they 'get' the web. They don't. Over the last year I have been looking at the online presence of a range of artists, from Kate Bush, superstar, Sandi Thom, contemporary minor chart artist, Nick Lowe, cult artist, to Roy Harper, forgotten cult artist. What they have in common is that in terms of the web they are spread all over the place: a My Space page, artist home page, record label page, wikipedia entry, YouTube videos, and fan sites, and they are represented inconsistently in each. For example, when Sandi Thom was promoting her last single on her website and MySpace page, the record label website didn't even mention it. Nick Lowe's latest release, At My Age, didn't have a wikipedia page until I created one. The only good examples of use of the web as a promotional and information tool were for Neil Young and Graham Parker.

But why is it so bad? Partly because looking after the web takes time: somebody has to sit down and update the pages, respond to queries, etc; it isn't clear whether this responsibility should fall on the artist, management, or label, and so in many cases it is done by nobody.

Underlying this is the more basic problem: music companies are used to a B2B (business-to-business) model, where they produced the physical product and handled promotion, but supplied the product to shops to sell to the consumer. Their 'audience' was therefore made up of retailers on the one hand and media on the other. They are completely unequipped for the activity of selling things direct to consumers: this is reflected in the reluctance of record companies to get involvced with selling digital downloads of their songs from their sites: usually, potential buyers are sent to itunes to buy it, letting them take a share of the revenue. Similarly, physical product is sold via Amazon.

Another result is a total focus on the new and exciting. In most businesses, it is much harder to reach new customers than to keep existing ones. The music business is obsessed with selling new artists to teenagers, generally through the singles chart. But that is only part of the market. Why not exploit the older consumer, with more time and money, who might be persuaded, fairly easily, to buy back-catalogue CDs, DVDs and books from an artist they like, or liked?; this is a market which has outgrown the need for things to be free: even a full-price CD is cheap cmpared to other expenses. A sensible music company would make damned sure that its artist profiles covered past as well as present and had links to sell things.

In the past the media, particularly radio, were the best way of reaching out to potential purchasers, but the web provides others. This should, eventaully, change the practices of the industry: it may become economically viable for some artists to sell very small numbers of tracks, as long as they don't cost much to produce and promote. The danger (from the companies' point of view) is that they may have little role, since the artists may be quite capable of handling it themselves.

But it is strange when audiences for broadcast media are declining and fragmenting, that there is a new audience on the web eager for information and opportunities to buy, and they are being ignored or left to the mercies of established players like itunes.

UPDATE
Holly A Hughes suggests, correctly, that artists should see this as an essential part of their brand. I'm not sure I agree about the fan forum, though: I've seen a lot of tumbleweed forums which make you feel that you are distrubing the dead (Sandi Thom's, for one, but even Kate Bush's has gone very quiet in last last year).

File under fiction: available now from Lulu.com

This debut collection of short stories by Martin Locock ranges from the misadventures of an archivist dealing with a landed family to a solicitor's obsession with a perfect family seen through a window.

The stories are fast-paced, sexy and funny.

Published by Carreg Ffylfan Press.

Contents:


Change and Decay

An archivist meets a gentry family amid a decaying estate and reveals some family history they had wanted to conceal.

"The train muttered and grunted to a halt, and the doors hissed open. I stepped out onto the deserted platform- none of my fellow-passengers were inspired to alight. I walked through an archway, leaning to even out the weight of the laptop case and suitcase, past spare mail trolleys queued for an unexpected pre-Christmas rush. A bus timetable yellowed behind a cracked glass display, ready to be sold to some transport museum as a bygone."

Read it online.


Exchange Mechanism

Developing a telepathy machine presents an opportunity for misuse and manipulation.

"I had got used to the prevarications of a series of boyfriends who would drag out our vidchats interminably on the offchance of catching a glimpse of my roommate Kristin walking around in the background. Although I'd tell them at the earliest opportunity that they were wasting their time (Kristin was 100% lezz), that didn't stop them looking."

Read it online.


Candles on the Table

What looked like the perfect family hides a dark secret.

"Stephen looked to the far side of the road, and saw a small neat cottage; one of the downstairs rooms was lit, and he could make out, with intrusive clarity, a woman setting cutlery on the table. Two candles were already burning in elegant simple candlesticks. On the wall behind the table there were small framed pictures and blue-and-white plates. He was enchanted, as much by the room as the figure; he had once thought that he would occupy such a house, everything just so."

Read it online.


The Time Zone Rule

Two colleagues are sent at short notice to Morocco; they succumb to the romance of the situation but then have to deal with the consequences.

"Sue's people carrier circled the staff car park while she became increasingly frustrated. Her criteria for what constituted an adequate space dropped ever lower. Designated personal parking spaces had been abolished the year before in a fit of executive egalitarianism, on the advice of a touchy-feely consultancy brought in to make the company 'a happier place to work'. It wasn’t working for her today, she thought grimly, gritting her teeth."

Not available online.


A night like this

A music reviewer picks up a girl at a Dylan gig in 1974.

Read it online.


The Grand Tour

A tourist in Italy spends the perfect afternoon sitting in a station cafe watching the world go by.

The waitress brought the drinks over to our table. Mine was a cappucino; this was back in the 1980s, before real coffee became universally available, and it was therefore something of an exotic treat. My friends had chosen lemonade in deference to the shimmering heat of August.
Philip unzipped a side pocket of his backpack and brought out a notebook.
'We've got three hours here to wait until the express comes through to take us to Florence.'
He looked around the station café, finding little prospect of amusement.
'I could do with changing some more travellers' cheques,' he continued, 'we'd have to catch the bus up to the main town to find a bank.'
'I'd like to go too,' said Malcolm,' there's a church with a 15th-century pieta I'd like to see.' He paused and turned to me. 'What about you?'
'I think I'll stay here,' I said.

Not available online.


A place of learning

Newbury University's Religious Studies department is rife with internal politics, complacency and frustration, while outside the comfortable Anglican certainties crumble.

Morning. Penelope Zbigniev tilted her head back, wiped her eyes, and yawned. She refocused on the computer screen and continued typing.

'Definitions of prayer vary across the world. For this study, the phenomenological approach has been taken, hence covering all individual spiritual activity which includes both ritual and contemplative components.'

She paused. She knew that a PhD thesis wasn't supposed to be interesting, but she took it as a bad sign that hers bored even the author. She stretched again, the old wooden chair creaking as she shifted her negligible weight on it. The small room was packed with stuff: books, ornaments, cover throws. Her housemates slept; undergraduates kept later hours. She looked out into the yard below her window. An ugly tomcat stalked along the wall, peering suspiciously at the foliage in the overgrown garden. He did this every day. Penelope wondered whether there was a contemplative component to his spiritual activity.

Not available online.


The Austen correspondence

An undiscovered letter from Jane to Cassandra.

Read it online.


Boswell continued

Further adventures of Johnson and Boswell.

"Being an addition by Another Gentleman to James Boswell's celebrated Life of Johnson, in which is described a visit to Lichfield, with instances of the Doctor's wit and sagacity which arose in the course thereof."

Read it online.


Fidelity

'I've left him.'
Sheila opened the front door wider to allow the distraught figure of her sister to enter. In no time, Linda was sat at the kitchen table, alternatively sobbing, sniffing, and taking a tissue.
'Max [sniff] is [sob] having [blow] an affair.'
'Are you sure?' asked Sheila, doubtfully.
'Yes,' said Linda, nodding wordlessly, 'it's a bit out of character, I know, doing something imaginative. You're right about him being dull.'
'I don't think I ever said . . .'
'You didn't have to. But there you go, he is having an affair. Well, good luck to him.'

Not available online.


The seducer's tale

The Fresher's Ball ends unexpectedly.

Read it online.


The price of everything

A beggar recounts an eventful day.

Read it online.


Street science

An unlikely friendship grows from a chance meeting at the hospital.

Read it online.


Sinners, all

A quite night in a bar, an argument, a wager.

Read it online.

Author's Notes

"Change and decay owes its title only indirectly to the hymn 'Abide with me'. I first encountered the phrase when reading Scoop at an impressionable age in my teens: it seemed to me at the time to be most perfect novel ever written, an opinion I have had little reason to alter. Re-reading it recently I became aware of how much of the atmosphere of country house living I had imbibed, reflected in Change and decay."

Not available online

About the Author

"I was born in Barrow-in-Furness, a grim grey shipbuilding town on the north end
of Morecambe Bay, drenched in the drizzle of the Irish Sea. Terraces huddled
beneath the silhouettes of cranes; as the hooter sounded the streets would fill
with tired but boisterous riveters and boilermakers heading for pub, chip shop,
or home, as preference and finance dictated.I cannot claim, however, that I
absorbed much of this atmosphere into my personality. By the age of 6
months I had left forever."

Not available online

188pp, 6" x 9"

It can be ordered from Lulu.com as a book or digital download.

My first day as an atheist meme

I saw this at Kafir Girl and thought it was in interesting set of questions, even if nobody has tagged me (sniff).

Can You Remember The Day That You Officially Became An Atheist?

I was at university and had a long debate with a Philosphy student friend in which I attempted to defend my belief at the time in a theist view that there was a prime mover god-type figure somewhere, albeit one which took no interest in what happened on Earth or anywhere else, or offered anybody eternal life. He asked the astute question why I believed this, since I had renounced any form of written or personal revelation on which to base it. By the next morning I had recognised that the belief was based on emotion not reason and I abandoned it; when I told him, I remember that he was surprised and impressed that I should actually alter my beliefs as a result of such a process.


Do you remember the day you officially became an agnostic?

Strangely enough, it was my confirmation (age 14). I had been going to church with my family for years without feeling that it applied to me; the course of confirmation classes had raised a series of moral conundrums without satisfactorily solving them (chief among them the purpose of pain and who goes to Heaven or Hell). But I was holding out in the expectation that once confirmed I would experience what otehr believers obviously did: some sense that there was something there that listened, and spoke to them. And after a grand service officiated at by a bishop I had thought, well, here goes. Nope, still nothing. It seemed obvious to me then that the whole structure was created by people, without any necessary input from God.


How about the last time you spoke or prayed to God with actual thought that someone was listening?

Never, not even at the level of wishing.


Did anger towards God or religion help cause you to be an atheist or agnostic?

Not at the time, although I find attempts to justify the Massacre of the Innocents make me cross now.


Were you agnostic towards ghosts, even after you became an atheist?

Yes. I took the view that at least ghosts have a long and varied tradition of people seeing them and writing about them, and I was at that time open-minded about the limits of consciousness, so I was happy to entertain the possibility of telepathy. The critical point from my point of view was that ghosts made no claim to scriptural authority: if they existed, they existed. It was some time later that I shifted to the view that people believe they see ghosts rather than people see ghosts.


Do you want to be wrong?

No. We ought to live this life as if it is all there is, doing the best we can. There is no framework for another life which can accommodate the principles of mercy, justice and partial revelation to the living which redounds any credit to God.

Sandi Thom: a last farewell

I have been an accidental archivist of the Sandi Thom saga for four years now, fighting a guerilla war over her Wikipedia pages to correct the more extravagant and lazy claims of her PR company. In the course of doing so, I have learned a little of how conventional publicity works: the sudden stream of 'lifestyle' features that precede any new record release, the positive gloss on any events in which the start is involved, the attempt to promote controversy by being banned from YouTube or criticising Lily Allen, and , underlying it all, a deliberate vagueness about tour dates, audiences and record sales.

What is funny is that not long ago this could have gone on largely unnoticed: if the media picked up on it, it was true, if not, it was forgotten, consigned to wastepaper baskets overnight. But thanks to the Internet, nothing ever really goes away. This means that everything is potentially 'on the record', and potentially therefore a future embarassment.

Just in the last few weeks, Sandi has said that she is:

* writing songs for films
* moving to Brighton
* moving to New York
* planning to marry and have a baby
* concentrating on becoming established in America
* touring Europe
* releasing another single off the last album
* recording a new album
* undertaking a tour of small venues in Scotland

Well, that will keep her busy!

But I won't be watching. If I am going to spend some of my time in monitoring Internet activity relating to an artist, I think I'd rather it was someone whose work I admired. So long Sandi - it's been, well, you know.

The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: boredom

We are certainly living through interesting times.

It's a shame they're not more interesting interesting times, though.

Kate Bush: underrated genius?

I must admit that Kate Bush is one of those artists that I have always quite liked but never got as far as buying any of their records. Partly I think that this was a reaction to the distrust of my motives: did I just like her because she was beautiful?

Having spent some time looking at YouTube clips and their comments, I see that I was unusual in worrying about this. No wonder she distanced herself from her fans: I would. Not that she really was a recluse. It's funny how easy it is these days to become a recluse: stop going to film premieres, refuse to appear on quiz shows, move outside the M25, and suddenly you'e Simeon Stylites living up a pole in the desert.

But as I say I mostly liked her work. Looking back now, you can see that the unusual side to it is not its variation in quality, but in its ambition. She avoids straightforward autobiographical narrative. You can argue whether she does manage to evoke Joyce's Ulysses in The Sensual World, but how many other artists would you even think of asking the question?

Which is not to say that great rock needs to have literary pretensions: but it does need to have some form of intellectual complexity if it aspires to be more than good time rock and roll. I like Oasis, me, but would be the first to admit that their lyrics are basically:

some stuff here
some stuff here
hoo-oo-oo-ook

In interviews she is eloquent and polite; this is enough of a rarity to make her sound like a genius in the context of music programmes. She might be a genius; but more to the point she is thoughtful. You can see how she reponds to questions: she thinks it over, then tries to get from a mundane fact 'You learned the violin, didn't you?' to something worth saying, like how this taught her music theory and discipline.

Listening to something like Aerial requires a degree of attention unusual these days, both in terms of the music and in the lyrics which are diffuse and referential; but it is precisely this complexity that provides the intrigue.


Perhaps it is a sign of genius that you are cleverer than your fans: certainly Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen are.

So are Metallica, but that's not quite the same thing.

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre: book review

I have been following Goldacre's column in the Guardian and latterly his blog for a couple of years now, since it is usually the best source of sensible information on any news story that touches on science, technology or medicine. I was fearful that the book might have shared the blogs slightly smug and inward-looking style ('we're clever people and we know everything'), but in fact it is well-written, coherent, and engaging, written in a light and chatty style.

There are extended accounts of the bizarre history of some recent media panics (MRSA, MMR, Dore, and fish oil), but more importantly, the science and 'science' of these stories is examined forensically, so that the reader learns to interpret news stories critically: what does "50% reduction" mean in this situation, what's the sample size. This is worthy and important and should (in time) change the way that news media present their accounts (I have already noticed a survey fatigue, where all involved seem happy to accept their spurious basis).

Perhaps the two most interesting chapters, though, are those on the placebo effect and on our perception of risk. I hadn't known, for example, that painkillers work better if they are packaged better and have been advertised, but it is true. The moral and practical implications of trying to deliver Evidence Based Medicine when this sort of placebo effect can dictate success or failure are a challenge. The chapetr on risk demonstrates at length how bad people are at distinguishing between chance events and patterns, between causation, correlation and coincidence, and how unreliable their accounts of their experiences can be, thanks to selection bias. This important factor explains why people sincerely believe things in the absence, or the face, of objective evidence, whether it is the Bridgend suicide 'cluster', electromagnetic sensitivity, or the Loch Ness Monster.

It should be noted that Goldacre does not adopt a hectoring tone: he argues that these are universal, human, traits; he just wishes us to be aware of them so that we can monitor our belief formation. He notes, for example, the tendency of people to use the limited evidence that moderate drinking is better for your health than teetotalism as a justification for their immoderate drinking. This is why factoids like 'red wine is good for you' are so powerful: there is so much contradictory advice out there that, as Paul Simon said, 'a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest' (an observation, incidentally, that is so perceptive and well-expressed that on its own should preserve his reputation for millenia).


The most contentious part of the book deals with the media and how they report science stories; Goldacre tries to explain why nonsense science so often trumps proper science in media coverage. He suggests that the fault lies with humanities background of most journalists, who find the science impenetrable and feel free to choose the wildest and most exciting of the opinions they are offered. Here he may be wrong, insofar as he assumes that science suffers alone. The sad truth is that the media deals badly with all areas of specialist endeavour. An archaeologist told me recently about press coverage of a Neolithic find; it was dated to 3000 BC, 5000 years ago; in print it became 3000 years old. I wasn't surprised: to the non specialist, it was simply 'very old'. There is an interesting question about how far journalists are to blame in not understanding or whether they undertsand adequately but dumb stories down because their readers won't need or want accurate details. This pervades serious newspapers: strange health advice is dished out in the supplements while in the main paper things are more rational. But perhaps we get the news coverage we deserve: if you want to depress yourself, look at the 'most read stories' list on the BBC News pages.

Goldacre believes that all media, and especially serious newspapers, are engaged in a project to educate and inform their readers; but they aren't. They are there to entertain, mainly: hence the celebritisation of news, with the daily updates of Pete Docherty's battle with drugs, and battles with photographers. But even in the old days, there was a strong vein of cynicism and philistinism in journalism: the attitude that the contents didn't need to be true, just true enough.

Nevertheless, the book is enjoyable and inspiring: the way he benourages the reader to engage with the primary sources should be enough to balance the increasing inaccuracy of the media as reliable informants.

Work in progress

I'm working on a long short story, The Time Zone Rule, which will be included in a collection of my fiction to be called File Under Fiction.

The Time Zone Rule is subtitled 'a modern romance' and is a obverse version of a romantic comedy: it starts with a one-night-stand between two colleagues who end up far away from home, and then explores how they ended up there and what the consequences are.