What will Radiohead do next?

It’s just over a year ago since I wrote the post ‘thoughts from a beach’ – in which I referred to an Interview with Thom Yorke in ‘The Believer’ music issue (still waiting for the2010 issue from Amazon – McSweeney’s publishing is pure gold), and wondered a bit about what Radiohead would do next. It’s something I again came to be thinking about – on the very same beach – just week before last.

This week, viewing the band’s fan-sourced Prague concert video (thoughtfully sound-tracked by the band hence worthwhile streaming quality if you can get it through decent speakers), I went beyond wondering. I am in fact, now quite eager to get my fix of the world’s most talented band once again. It’s been over a year since Radiohead began new studio sessions with long-time producer Nigel Godrich so something must be due fairly soon, but when? However, it’s not so much when as what that interests me most.

Since In Rainbows, there is a massive distraction around Radiohead now – about the way they deliver music. Echoing the music scene itself all too often, there’s a fascination with how the band will release its new music – by what method – possibly more than an interest in the music itself.

But in terms of release strategy, what is there left for the band to do, having made their big statement with “In Rainbows”? Free agents as they are – and now self-appointed business model mavericks – the sky’s no limit – but is there anything that hasn’t already been done?

We’ve had free songs, free albums, track-by-track ‘episodic releases’ – dispensing with the album format – and the release of song-stems for fans to mix themselves. We’ve had crowd-sourced albums, pay-what-you-feel albums and a song-a-day for a year. It’s been done to death. It’s almost boring. Besides, the pay-what-you-like strategy with In Rainbows clearly underwhelmed. It was in fact the made to order box-sets that really ‘performed’.

I was impressed with the value-added packages The Arcade Fire released (through Topspin) – but not as impressed as the record itself, you will have gathered. I want the same from Radiohead. With all my interest in music business models and product innovation, what I need most of all, as a life-long fan, is an unceremonious release of a classic Radiohead album. But is that what they have planned I wonder?

Checking out the competition
Most musicians, especially popular ones who’ve achieved big success and have a reputation to live up to, can be fiercely competitive. Creatively that is. They wouldn’t be as crude as to be commercially competitive of course!

At Wilco’s show on Tuesday night at the Royal Albert Hall I was wondering what was going on through Ed O’Brien’s head as he nodded along throughout the duration of a wonderfully consistent evening’s music.

In recent times – like Radiohead – Wilco has delved deep into sonic experimentation and have gone way out there creatively – notably with records ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’ and ‘A Ghost Is Born’ – but never at the expense of writing truly great songs – consistently.

It would be nice to think Ed took inspiration from the evening and that between their extraordinary creative individual and collective genius – Radiohead’s prime strategy next time out is to make a major statement first and foremost through the music.

It’s good to be back
A brief thanks to all for sticking with me through a busy summer in which writing JB posts has had to take a back seat. Hopefully I’ll post more often towards the end of this year – a vintage one music wise in my view and well worth more reflection.

Meantime – for fresh discovery I recommend the new Shuffler.fm blog streaming service. Currently in free beta, it is a wonderful way to discover all kinds of stuff you couldn’t even hope to find in most music service catalogues – what a great idea. Anything that scales blogs is most clever. I’ll need to consider its commercial potential for a later post.

Season's Greetings and Apologies #1

Each week I receive at least one, sometimes two or three, e-mails that come via this blog, from artists just starting out in life, or managers looking for a new way. It has only really dawned on me that this adds up to a hundred or so such contacts in the year.
I’m sorry to say that I have responded to no more than a dozen. I’ve only managed to read a few more than that properly. And I have on just one or two occasions got ‘round to giving the audio clips sent through to me a play. Any that I have replied to or listened to have been on a fairly randomised basis – catching me on a good day so to speak.

So – to all who have contacted me and have either had a half-arsed reply or more probably no reply at all, please accept my sincere apologies. The same goes to all those brave folks who have written to me about their brand new digital music ventures – I’ll post a proper apology to you folks in a day or two.

For the artists and managers, firstly, I wholly appreciate that you read this blog. And I appreciate you taking the initiative to contact me directly, it shows how much you are scanning the market and seeking out any clues to a new approach – something outside the over-worn and ever more precarious tracks of ‘route 1 to market’. To me that’s a positive sign you’ll have some success.

The reason for my non-reply rate is simply that most precious of modern commodities, time. I’m no A&R guy either, as you might have figured out by now if you read JB regularly. You’ll also know that I don’t give out codswallop marketing advice or cod-self-help, this blog isn’t the place for that.

There are plenty of actually rather good places to get genuine advice and fresh ideas. Music Think Tank is great. Derek Sivers’ stuff can be insightful and inspiring. There are occasionally inspired interventions by David Byrne & others in the space – all of whom know this subject rather better than I do.

The ‘Artist Services’ business is booming – you should take advantage of all the low-priced digital service platforms out there – the bandcamps, reverbnations etc. I even signed up to RandR World myself and have found that as a ‘linked-in’ for musicians, it seems to work just as effectively (does Linked-In work effectively?). There are emerging services that focus more specifically on artist career strategies including Rick Goetz’s Musician Coaching. In short, the ‘answers’ are out there.

That said, and for what it’s worth, whenever I have had these types of conversations, what I think I know and do advise comes down to a few suggestions and these are they:

My five codes of conduct for the emerging artist that’s different:

1. Be in no hurry whatsoever. Why would you be? You are in the field with several million competitors, so an attempt to win a race this isn’t. New music flows onto the market in a continuous, random fashion, so the fans are expecting nothing. Your ‘market-entry-strategy’ is all basically about when you are ready. One trend that does strike me these days is how apparently full-formed bands look when they do emerge. Have you seen & heard Delphic yet? They remind me of Radiohead several albums in. You can’t rely on music to sustain you a living in the early days anyhow, so you are likely to have alternative means of support anyhow. So write as many good songs as you can. It’s better to have two albums worth of strong material when something starts to happen for you.
   
2. Set expectations high. Why wouldn’t you? You know all that commentary about the new ‘middle-class’ artist and sustaining a career ‘from 1000 fans’? It’s all utter bunk. Claptrap. Total rhubarb. How on earth, in the current climate of low-loyalty and limitless choice, will you ever convince a small army of dedicated fans to stick with you and buy your stuff long enough for you to have a decent career? It’s too much to ask. The only way bands have acquired a sizeable, dedicated following is by breaking into the big time, for however short a period. You must strive and work towards a breakthrough. How you sustain it from there is critical too – but you need to breakthrough somehow.
   
3. Hone your craft in live performance. Can you win over audiences? If the answer is a genuine yes, how are you doing it? With song quality, performance, charm or shock value? Work on the combination. Artists that can get there audiences to ‘transcend’ are, as they say in the old school, the ‘real deal’. You will build a local following and word will spread from there. If it isn’t working on that level, consider changing the material or the membership!
   
4. Scan the market. The music market changes constantly. As with all good marketing strategies, understanding the environment in which you are operating is critical to success. Did you catch the news of a new artist investment fund the other week? Did you see that a big corporate is working with an ex-musician to develop services including A&R? Do you have a song that is relevant to something happening out there in which your song could give resonance? Marketing is all about finding context for your stuff. You will need to have one band member or manager or someone out there for you market scanning with one eye on the prize. This is an investment of time and thought, not necessarily money.
   
5. Get a plan together. There is no substitute, in my book, for a proper business plan. They never work and they always get scrapped in the end, but the discipline of knowing where you set out from, with what – and a bit of the how – is the best way to get started. I recently met guitarist Martyn Shone from the band Honey Ryder. He shared with me some of the band’s business plans. It was impressive. No wonder the band sold enough shares in themselves to build up a marketing budget equivalent to that of a major label with launch band, but with none of the binding clauses. Just an obligation to do everything in their power to succeed on the major stage.

Good luck. Seasons Greetings.
Oh, and apologies.

In the next couple of posts, I apologise to any number of start-ups, sum up my music of the decade and look forward to major business breakthroughs in 2010. Also, do look out for my next guest post on the MIDEMNET blog as you might like it.

Music is a different business – it should do more for music that’s different

A week or so ago, I made five recommendations of music that’s a bit different to my (& maybe your) usual tastes, as part of my strategy to prioritise my music consumption – as set out in this previous post.

Those records were new or recent releases by Portico Quartet, Spiro, Steve Martin, Bill Frisell, The Unthanks and Pink Martini. None of them are ‘popular’ – but each album does fall into a category of sorts – one the many hundreds of music genres or sub-genres. Even Pink Martini – a blend of just about everything except pop, is described on Wikipedia as ‘vintage music’ – a sub genre probably, of ‘easy listening’.

As an industry – if you can really refer to the distribution of commercial music as an industry (a worthy post-grad paper perhaps) – the incredible, bewildering variety of products is what makes the music business totally unique. No other business that I know of puts full-blown produced products out there on the market without any prior knowledge of what will happen next. Sure, if you have a major pop artist with a known commercial track record and the whole dashboard of modern demand metrics, you might be able to put together a half-decent sales forecast – but you’d still be pushing it to be within + or – 100%.

But forget those, if you have any one of the above records – in niche genres – how on earth do you know if you can even hope to break even on releasing the record commercially – i.e. having funded its discovery, production, marketing and distribution? Because the one thing you do know is that you will not have a global hit on your hands.

In this sense, the music business is also unique – in that there are few genuinely ‘independent’ or ‘alternative genre’ records that become global smash hits. The movie business is different – it produces - even if it’s just a couple - of real indie smashes each year, pretty consistently. Be it Blair Witch, The March Of The Penguins, Slumdog, or the very latest example - Paranormal Activity – the small guys can make it really, really big in film.

It happens less so in music – if you look at the top fifty selling albums each year they are dominated by pop records released by majors. Neither small independent’s or niche genre artists get a look in. There are clear reasons based on industry structure. Film has an established independent film network that is supported by major festivals around the world – many of which are celebrated as significant cultural events. It has an ‘art-house’ cinema distribution network too. Film also gets significant government support on the investment side.

The music industry doesn’t have the equivalents. Yes there are numerous small venues that cater to the alternative – but they are not effectively networked and so do not make up more than the sum of their parts. Same for independent labels, really – hence there have been recent initiatives to give the sector a much needed leg-up – such as independent charts. But these often confuse ‘independence’ between source – i.e. label and actual musical style. As for retail, well we can see what’s happened there and it is almost too painful to keep watching.

Music that’s genuinely different, alternative or niche must simply submit to being commercially second-rate. The only global phenomenon of the same nature I can recall is the success of the Buena Vista Social Club Cuban music movement – and that all started with – an independent movie!

I applaud initiatives that try up the ante for the ‘movement’ that is niche music – such as the upcoming January 2010 Reverb festival of concerts at the Roundhouse, which has some support from the Arts Council of England and local Camden Council – though only small commercial sponsors.

However, I’m absolutely convinced this music can scale better than it does, if only it had the right platform. After all, this is the digital age where niche content was in fact supposed to have become the heir to the Blockbuster King, by now according to the uber-thinking-journalists.

Take this simple insight. I have three Pink Martini CDs so I like them – they have grown on me over the years without necessarily becoming an act I would recommend to others regularly. But I know I could name maybe 20-30 other people in my life who would like them as much as me if not more so – but who have never even heard of them. My feeling is that Portico Quartet could achieve the same sort of crossover potential in the UK that Jazz trio E.S.T. achieved in their native Sweden – where they regularly made the mainstream charts.

While I wouldn’t say the same for Spiro or The Unthanks – I’m am pretty convinced that they could probably triple whatever little they do sell - easily – if only they could get some effective, targeted exposure to their receptive audiences, and that could well be the difference between loss & profit.

Steve Martin, well, he doesn’t exactly need to have a hit – and has in fact spent extravagant amounts of his own money on making and touring his ‘The Crow’. But it is such a good record it deserves success in its own right, not just as some kind of vanity project. As for Bill Frisell – at least he is on exactly the right label to connect with his audience – Nonesuch – which specialises in route-to-market for eclectic, different music aimed at the more mature, discerning ear.

And here is the second insight for today. I’m a mature and enthusiastic music fan who has listened to so much stuff that I am receptive – in a state of absolute readiness – to hear more music that’s different. Where do I connect with my fellow audience? I’ve no doubt that audience is large (huge globally); fairly well-off and fairly uninterested in piracy – probably even pro-actively disposed to paying top whack for music - as the rich cultural good that it is. The reason we don’t buy much these days is we are uninspired and ill-informed. No one is putting this music in front of us.

Now I know there is the BBC and in the US, ‘public radio’ – and this is great. Programmes like ‘Late Junction’ are the equivalent of splendid cuisine for the ears – even if you sometimes have to work at it to acquire the taste first. But I don’t really do radio. I want to check this stuff out on demand and then buy it and keep playing it until I love it.

Also, I know these artists could get greater exposure in a number of ways – like what if Portico could get a support slot for Radiohead, or if Spiro got a great synch opportunity? That could break ground, but only as a one-off, transient thing – it might serve those artists well if they are lucky – but it’s not reaching that huge global audience of un-served, unlucky listeners.

And finally here’s the irony. In the UK we are about to get bombarded with new music services (again) – each one upping the ante on the ‘business model’ – more & more music for less & less cash. But the music is always the same stuff. The front-line recommendations are the big artists about to assault the radio networks, the TV and press. Spotify this week has the exclusive with Robbie Williams (do they really need each other?). Sky Songs has launched – in a promotion with The Sun newspaper. It’s like daytime radio all over again - the same music to the broadest audience possible.

Even out of those six million songs in the impressively large catalogues, there’s nothing for we-who-want-different, since we don’t know what we’re looking for, or if we do and hit search, it will not be there more than half the time.

Why don’t we do something different for those people who want something different? I’m on the case...the next post will show us the way...

Artist Path to Market (Post #2): Avoid the Hype Machine go for the Slow Burn to Success

Ah the one hit wonder. It’s a music industry staple isn’t it? Great one-off hits have lit up the charts for as long as the charts have existed, cultivating a love-hate relationship with the public. Everyone should have a personal favourite. Mine is ‘I Am The Beat’ by The Look, which sadly, reveals mostly nothing much but my age.

It charted in the UK at number 6 in 1980 and had nice shades of The Jam and XTC. And wonder of wonders, a quick Google entry, and it is right there on YouTube. An amazing 39,152 (and steadily rising!) views, reassures me that I am not alone. It’s had 4,426 plays on Last.fm (slowly rising) and was re-released as a download in May 2006. The miracle of the internet - it has opened up a world of discovery and fun for nostalgia fans at least.

Of course, no serious artist wants to be a one hit wonder, quite the opposite. Even if artists don’t seek fame, fortune, adoration & idolation, which many don’t, they might quite like a sustainable career. But with the traditional ‘Route 1’ to market – i.e. signing a label deal – undergoing something of a re-appraisal, are there genuine alternative new routes to a sustainable career for artists?

Currently on the blog aggregator site Hype Machine, you will find a (very popular and very useful) composite list of the Top 50 Songs, Albums and Artists, aptly named ‘Music BlogZeitgiest’. Those not predisposed to tracking this kind of thing semi-obsessively, will recognise less than half of the albums and bands that feature. But that’s because many of those albums are debuts (I guessed about half of the 50 ‘zeitgiested’ albums were) by young, up & coming bands, very much in the ascendant. That’s because blogs are at the cutting edge of music taste and opinion, generally in a good, genuine and passionate way, if sometimes a bit nerdy with it.

Part of that nerdiness is the competitive nature of blogs and of music discovery in the current, online-led, media landscape. Bloggers, as with DJs, like to feel it’s they who have disseminated to the masses, news of the next big thing. Pitchfork pretty much started it all off, at least in the indie space, and is still seen as that genre’s tastemaker supreme.

But this addiction is rubbing off on the mainstream media as well. These days, to accompany the usual slew of annual round-up best-of lists in the music magazines, broadsheets and radio shows, come the beginning of year predictions of the next big thing. These two perennials, the end-of-year best of lists and the ‘this years’ next big thing lists, combine to kick off the industry Hype Machine that lasts all year long.

But the key question for artists is this: do you really want to be among the crop of artists that are fed into The Machine? UK 6 Music DJ Steve Lamacq BBC - 6 music - Steve Lamacq asks the same question on his blog recently. The exposure is great, but the potential for over-exposure and worse, backlash, seems a very real risk. Analysis of both albums made and sales from each album reveals ever- shortening life-cycles for modern day pop artists.

Looking back to one year ago – the collective ‘buzz’ being generated around any number of new bands that included The Horrors, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Palladium – was almost claustrophobic. I’m not singling out those bands for any reason, just examples. This year, in the UK business, it seems to be a crop of female singer songwriters – but a different crop of female singer songwriters to last year. And every now & again, the Hype Machine spins way out of control and literally creates a monster. We all remember The Darkness.

I haven’t so far, been a big subscriber to the Long Tail theory, but maybe it will emerge after all, by default. The long tail is currently being well stocked with an ever-increasing volume of short career span artists, who were ‘this year’s big thing’ at the time but never got past album two in the end.

But is there a solution? A path to longevity, other than obscurity? After all the life-cycle trend runs pretty deep. It isn’t just a result of the hype machine. Label deal terms are shorter, with five album deals rare these days, replaced largely by the ‘two album firm’. Other contributing factors are the sheer volume and choice of new music and the resulting impact on fan loyalty to any one artist. Improvements in production means that debut albums sound better than they ever did, setting high standards from the off and establishing a high sales watermark the artist can only dream of matching second time around. An interesting, though partly tongue-in-cheek post on the Guardian Music Blog’s School of Rock series, has some tips on longevity (see bibliography below).

If anything, a good manager or label will do the upmost to resist the hype machine for the artists they represent, in favour of longer term development and eventual world domination. Hat’s off to Virgin for the more subtle approach taken last year with Laura Marling, for example, despite the temptation to go hyper. And see the previous post on this blog about the intricately managed ascendance of the very excellent Elbow. At the end of the day, the age-old principle holds true – artist development is what matters most.

Assuming an artist has made a special record/set of songs, I think two approaches are required:

1. Careful, subtle navigation through the hype machine – avoid irritating over-exposure too early on, and prevent any unnecessary backlash.
2. Ensuring a handful of alternative approaches are somewhere in the marketing plan, to avoid over-reliance on the conventional route.

I see no particular distinction in the above, between digital and physical, or mainstream marketing. It isn’t about the channels. It’s about following the various routes to the audience you want to reach. The audience, channels, brands and content created all need to be woven into an integrated, long term plan – not a throw it all at the wall promo frenzy lasting one month before album release and one month after. I’m not saying don’t promote, but promote to the audience you want to reach. Use the brands and platforms your audience engages with the most.

In discussing this whole longevity vs. hype thing recently someone asked me an interesting question though: If artist life-cycles are reducing so much and the industry machine working ever-faster, how can it be that so many veterans – more than ever it seems - still show a very fruitful presence on the current scene? It’s not such an oxymoron as you might think. In fact it makes perfect sense. Every trend has a counter-trend – an antidote.

I’m convinced more than ever that modern commercial music is two markets: new music and the classic catalogue, with the latter creating ample space for comebacks, both on the recording and touring front.

But, in this polarised world, riddle me this: how many artists can you name that are doing well, creatively and commercially, on their 4th or 5th album? How many Coldplays, Pearl Jams, Radioheads or Wilcos do we now have? It’s strikingly few and that’s a shame, since we, the fans lose out following artists from album-to-album. Or perhaps it’s just the beginning of a change we need to accept.

It used to be that the relationship between frontline, new music and the catalogue, was symbiotic, whereby the best discoveries in new music would replenish catalogue, helping record labels to recoup their substantially risky investments in perpetuity (not quite, with copyright ownership limited to some 50 years of course).

But I’m convinced this relationship is broken and that this pipeline is no longer open. The last album through the gates from new to classic was OK Computer, discuss?

There are no easy answers other than a more careful, strategic approach to artist & content development, including the need to take long periods out of the game, to both renew the creative process and avoid over-exposure. My prediction for who will be big in 2009? I wouldn't care to say as I don’t think it does anyone any great favours.

But back to The Darkness. Justin Hawkins has of course, made a comeback recently with his new band Hot Leg. Not to be taken wholly seriously perhaps, but Hawkins inadvertently makes a good point. One path to creative longevity may well be to bounce back again and again under various new projects. Luke Steele previously of The Sleepy Jackson has done same with his new project Empire Of The Sun. What was previously known as ‘The Side Project’ might be the key to keeping it fresh and sustaining a musical career.

Brief bibliography for this piece:
‘Hype Machine’, Bill Wasik, Oxford American
‘Hype Springs Eternal’, Alan McGee, on the Guardian Music Blog
‘The Thinking Man’s Take On: The Hype Machine, Chris Barth, Pretty Much Amazing
‘The Rihanna Challenge’, Kyle Bylin, Hypebot
‘What’s the Secret to Creative Longevity’, Will Byers, Guardian Music Blog

Music artists your route to market is as easy as A, B, C...(post#1)

“For all it may be a workable and pragmatic model, a teenager miming with a tennis racket in front of the mirror is hardly dreaming about running a small business with low overheads and low expectations”.
Alexis Petridis, The Guardian, from “This song was brought to you by...” April 2008.

It’s never been easy for pop musicians who are not yet popular. A few years back, a friend of mine delightedly, excitedly told me his mate’s band (UK indie hopeful’s Vega 4) had at last been signed by a label in the US - a major in fact, Capitol. What did I think about that? My response was inevitably, rather muted. “Do let him know when you congratulate him that his chances of a sustainable career in the music industry have just improved, to roughly 1%”.

Since I was The King of Music Industry Stats at the time, he couldn’t really argue. The percentage I quoted was the appropriate one – the chances of releasing a record and going to Gold sales, and therefore, being in with a shout of getting a second album with real momentum behind it. It didn’t happen for Vega 4, even though the band was unusually fortunate to get a second bite of the cherry when they signed in the UK with Columbia 18 months later. They sunk with barely a trace.

That was back in 2005/6. Fast forward just a few years, and the music industry landscape for a new band has become even more crowded, competitive and complex. With an increasing groundswell against the idea of signing with a label (at least in the traditional sense) - but a rapidly fragmenting media landscape making any other route look bewildering - what exactly is the best route to market for a new artists these days?

Two HUGE questions face you:

1. Just what do you do to get your music heard? and;
2. Just how long do you intend to last?

This was the subject of a very recent discussion I took part in for Radio 4’s Today Programme. In fact, the programme never got aired due to the valuable airtime being sucked up by UK retailers going down like nine pins in the recession. It’s a shame, because the debate was interesting. A young Welsh artist called Rod Thomas was involved. http://www.rodthomasmusic.com/. For Rod & artists like him these two questions might as well be written in huge letters on the side of a wall the size of El Capitan, they are so big.

But what exactly do you do to climb up & over the wall? And how do you make sure that when you reach the top, you don’t take two steps forward only to drop right off over the other side? It isn’t enough to do everything and hope for the best, yet in the ultra competitive landscape of new music, a lot of artists do exactly that.

The ‘strategy’ such as it is, follows a much worn path. With or without the help of a label, the approach usually follows all of the following (and, appreciated, probably much more):

- Set up various digital properties: Artist site, MySpace, Facebook, iLike profiles etc.
- PR your best songs & story to tastemakers in the music press, radio and TV
- Do lots of live shows and get mixes to DJs, clubs & bars

If you can get any traction at all you can start to build your own fan base through a digital ‘street team’ approach, collecting emails for mail outs and deploying various digital widgets to get these fans to spread your music a little further.

This is all very well, and to some extent if you didn’t do this, you wouldn’t be covering all the bases you need to, so go ahead - and good luck. If some traction is gained and a buzz starts to generate, it’s then time to seriously ponder Huge Question 2: what is your longer term plan? Are you focused on sustainability, longevity? Or do you just want to get a deal and take it step-by-step. If the answer is the latter and you are in a hurry to get signed and get on with it, that’s fine. You just have to be aware of being sucked into the Hype Machine (Post #2 of this series, coming soon).

If it is the former, there are deeper things to consider. There are options to be more strategic about your approach, what you do and when you do it. I can’t offer a cut out template solution, obviously. Since each and every artist is different, it would hardly be appropriate. Individuality & uniqueness – preferably with great quality and low on gimmickry – are critical, and in short supply.

What you can and must do, is recognise wider trends in music consumption and work with these – or if you are supremely confident – deliberately against them. But recognition and understanding of what’s going on with wider trends might just help give you a focus, edge and advantage. I’ve specifically noted three trends here – a kind of A, B, C rule that you may want to keep in mind in working up your strategies for winning, building & keeping your audience.

Rule A – Recognise that music discovery is shifting from recordings to live performance

Used to be you could do all sorts to ‘get the record out there’. Of course you still can, but with greater choice and ubiquity and fragmented channels for recordings, it’s a less effective method, because whether or not people get to hear it is less relevant than when they get to hear it and how they feel when they do. It is contextual discovery that’s important. And that’s were live performance can be so effective – because it has a greater impact on the listener.

Radio is background for most. Music streaming services are more active, sure, but users are either streaming back playlists, which makes the experience more like radio anyhow. And if they are actively looking for certain artists or checking recommendations, they may well be ‘snacking’, so artists, you can’t hope that your music will make a truly impactful impression in the way you intended when you lovingly, painstakingly wrote & recorded the track. When music is live, the listener is actively receptive to the music – they want to hear you play. They are ready to be moved & convinced by you & your music.

The catch is there’s no catch. You just have to play live a lot, in a lot of different places and to keep your audience – with a lot of variety. That’s why Jack Savoretti http://www.jacksavoretti.com/ toured Caffe Nero’s up & down the country. And make sure you have a way to make the listener tune into you again when you’ve finished performing. So think USB giveaways, flyers with download codes etc. And think quality. Make sure what you give away directly to your live audience are your very best tracks or recordings of your best live performances. And if you don’t consider yourself to be a ‘live act’, and you’re not Kate Bush, get out of the business!

Rule B – Understand that the internet is not an effective platform for discovery, when you’re on the supply side

This is just the flipside of A, very simply. The web is a very misleading platform sometimes, because it’s so eulogised. For all the talk of democratising content and liberating the long tail, digital platforms are essentially bigger icebergs, with narrower tips, than mainstream media platforms. Viral videos are statistically harder to achieve than hit records – and generate a lot less revenue. The long-tail has been largely debunked as far as music providers are concerned. See the recent work by Will Page and Andrew Bud.

The majority of people actually want to be advised what to like, so aggregators & filters are where you need to be. No wonder an iTunes or e-music feature can be worth so much – such real estate is valuable, as it will be on successful new digital aggregators such as ISPs, when they arrive. Although it’s hard to get onto these, in the same way it is to reach mainstream media gatekeepers, you can service them better with varied, regularly refreshed content and you should strive to build a relationship with music programmers and content editors purely through innovating with content. Beck is pretty inspiring when it comes to this sort of stuff.

Rule C – Make sure that your representatives get Rules A&B

A label might still be ‘Route 1’ to reaching an audience (discuss). But you do need to think about what audience you want to reach and for how long do you want to keep that audience. With labels working the Hype Machine ever faster out of sheer necessity, you may reach a wider audience more quickly, but with no guarantee of longevity – in fact a risk of flash-in-the-pan like transience that may prove hard to recover from in the longer term. This is complicated and deserves more detailed analysis.

Fan loyalty is hard to build and harder to hold on to. Actual research with consumers, as well as the market data, confirms that loyalty is on the wane. Yes, you can carefully manage e-mail lists and work hard on engagement tools like digital service profiles and blogs. You should definitely work on more episodic content releases – shorter EP’s, live sessions etc. and keep some exclusives for your own lists even though you are reaching smaller audiences than the big digital platforms (these are crammed full, remember).

From some recent presentations made elsewhere and from comments on this blog, there is a growing list of new artists who might be working their way slowly to a workable, pragmatic DIY model (Corey Smith, Ingrid Michaelson, Jill Sobule, Joe Purdy, Jonathan Coultan ). These have all been stated as examples of the new ‘middle class’ of artists who can make a viable living from making music. Whether or not they want to be classified in such a way I have no idea. That’s back to the opening quote and for every artist starting out these days, to seriously consider.

Artists the industry needs you. But we want your fans too

The music biz loves a panacea. So far this century we’ve had file-sharing, then online retail, then mobile music, then music & brands, then ad-funded music, then 360 degree deals, then total-music, so on and so forth. And now we have them all at once, with experimentation seen by some as the new solution.

A lot of recent talk that has intrigued me has been of ‘owning’ the artist-to-fan relationship, and making more of all that. Ticketmaster just bought Front Line Management and is re-launching itself with the intent of capturing the whole artist-to-fan experience, thing. We’ve recently had majors, most specifically EMI, talk about the same concept, quite a lot. Live Nation bought Music Today a few years back and Music Today was doing this from the outset – selling all sorts of artist stuff – direct through artist websites to a mailing list of signed-up fans. Now Amazon has launched 100,000 artist stores aiming to do a similar thing.

Not only that, a number of brand new businesses have been launched recently, with the central business model of helping artists manage relationships with their fan bases directly – same theme again. There’s been a whole slew of these launched, but my personal one-to-watch in the space is Topspin Media, for fairly obvious reasons – smart leadership and a well funded operation with some early successes in working with the likes of David Byrne & Brian Eno on their recent collaborative release in the US. The attraction of a model like Topspin, to artists, is that it enables artists to get a good start in managing all of their digital spaces and properties themselves and so to begin building a fan base that way (without signing to a label deal). Even more clearly, to my mind, these services enable established artists who already have a core & loyal long-term following, to keep their digital plots well watered.

I don’t doubt there is something in all of this, but what exactly? Is it just me, or is there a slight suspicion of alchemy with this concept?

As a fan (of say Elbow, which I am, big time) I can pretty much get whatever I want from Elbow, the way I want it, already. I’m happy to sign-up to the artist site provided I don’t get bombarded. I haven’t struggled to get tickets for the band’s shows and of course I buy the records and have bought a video from iTunes and rented another from Virgin Media. I read interviews with Guy Garvey in music magazines and listen to his 6 music show sometimes. As an Elbow fan, that does me, and is very fulfilling experience, thank you very much (after all, it is Elbow’s music that matters to me most). What’s more, I enjoyed shopping around for these things and the serendipity of just finding them available at the right time & place. I feel no particular need to get them all in one place at the wrong time.

Now it may well be that Elbow wants more fans like me or desires a wider audience. No problem there either. I have been evangelical about the band for two years and especially this year. I’ve recommended them, bought their record as gifts and taken friends to the shows. In some cases this has led to more fans for Elbow, thanks to that most powerful of mediums – word of mouth – something the band inspires a lot of I would imagine, just by doing what they do.

For the greater part of the artists out there that’s the way success will continue to happen. To this day, we don’t really have an example of an artist that has ‘broken’ (okay I’m not defining that term) through digital media alone. No artist that I know of has been able to make a living via building a direct relationship with their audience through just a kit bag of digital tools, unless that audience was built previously during a commercial recording career.

How many separate artist places does a fan want to sign up to and want to get stuff from anyhow? We’ve had artist subscriptions – Prince, The Who (remember ‘Hooligans’?), Madonna etc. - these have all struggled as commercial entities in themselves. And that’s for major superstars!

In this day and age, with more & more releases, commercially via the mainstream and via DIY platforms, are a zillion direct-to-fan artist properties what’s required? As an artist, can you work to foster loyalty in an age where, because choice and media proliferate, loyalty is exactly the quality that consumers demonstrate less and less? I’m not sure very many artists will be able to do that.

Myspace is living proof of the need to build a collective concept around what artists can provide individually. Fans aren’t dedicated to one myspace page. They will use myspace as a resource to find out about artists that interest them – including sampling the songs of course.

In the artist-to-fan space, who will win out? Myspace, Last.fm and iLike have sucked traffic away from artist pages for a couple of years now. If the labels want to take a more direct role in building the artist-to-fan audience, they will need to win this traffic back to artist sites. Either that or do deals to get data from these sites. But data feeds from these services might not make sense for specific artists when taken out of the context of the service itself. I’ve worked with data for a good chunk of my career and I’ve worked on CRM concepts – the execution of which is 100 times harder than thinking up the concept. If and when you do get the data and it’s clean and has context, it’s then what you do with it that counts.

Where choice explodes and content supply proliferates, common sense tells us what is needed most are aggregators, filters, curators etc. In digital, we need content brands that package & programme multiple artists and music genres in pretty much the same way magazines and retailers do in the traditional physical space. Just new, better ones with more immersive, addictive experiences for fans.

With digital, come all sorts of new opportunities for new entrants in the aggregator space – including ISP’s, device makers, music editorial and radio brands, even labels (if the roster makes cohesive sense). These aggregators bring in and build fans for artists with the added functionality of a direct transaction. Sure, if the fans want more from a particular artist, they might sign up to the artist’s site, but that happens already doesn’t it? And labels have the data from those, don’t they? So what exactly is new in the artist-to-fan space?

So again, my issue with exploring brave new territory in the artist-to-fan space is this: what is the big value-add? What is the nature of the connection being made, with what experience and content, and how, via which platforms?

Artist’s & managers should quickly delve beneath any hyperbole on this (in the same way they have done for 360 degree deals), and ask the searching questions about what relationship they want to build with their fans, how, and who should help them do it. The choices are out there and growing, but no one has really nailed it yet. It isn’t clear who will win out among the providers of these services, mainly because the services themselves are not being clearly articulated.