New product post #3: Digipacks vs. Jewel Case - majority decision reached

I’m all for improvements in CD packaging – have been for a long time. I’ve talked about it both on this blog and during my time at the IFPI.

Indeed, in a memo to Guy Hands last year (did anyone in this industry not write a Memo For Guy?) my first recommendation was for him to take the initiative in transforming CD packaging across the piece - no more jewel cases.

Labels and music retailers should show the customer that the industry cares about its product and release all CDs in the superior digipack format (preferably using recycled materials).

After all, until we discover the value in digital music, surely the best route to monetization in the current music business, is through a better physical product?

Of course this call to action is naive, because it would cost the industry money to do this, and it isn't necessarily a cost that can be passed on to consumers. The CD is a volume product. Not only that, it is rapidly being commoditized. UK single artist CD prices have fallen by one-fifth over the past five years, from an average of £10.21 in 2003 to just £8.10 in 2008.

To reverse this trend is probably impossible. However, it's conceivable that music buyers’ perceived value of a CD album is, in this day & age, much lower than its current price. A notable shift in the quality of packaging (coupled with content extras) might be enough to hold CD prices where they are, or at least allow retailers to stem the relentless tide of discounting.

There is of course, a long list of logistical manufacturing issues to contend with. The digipack is more labour-intensive (someone has to stick the booklet on the inside card cover) and has longer lead times than jewel boxes. Demand planning is trickier, since jewel boxes are interchangeable with any CD booklet insert, whereas a digipack cover is printed specifically for that title. You need to plan carefully for how many you can sell - and who on earth can judge that accurately in this most unpredictable of businesses? In summary, it's difficult, costly and risky for any one company to move unilaterally on this issue.

Until now that is. At long last, there is a real catalyst to change CD packaging for the better. That catalyst is the environment, which music industry organization Julia’s Bicycle has articulated superbly so far.

At a recent event Hosted by Sony Music, Julie’s Bicycle took the opportunity to begin the process of aligning some key packaging goals across the whole music business. The facts are pretty compelling, as recently published in the Julie’s Bicycle report ‘Impacts & Opportunities, Reducing the Carbon Emissions of CD packaging’:

• The recording industry could reduce its packaging emissions by up to 95% by switching from the plastic jewel case to card packaging
• Consumers would prefer card packaging, particularly heavy CD buyers. More than half of those surveyed (55%) preferred the card wallet version of Coldplay’s Viva la Vida to the jewel box version
• 75% of CD buyers agreed it would be a positive step to shift to environmentally friendly packaging
• Some manufacturers are developing even more environmentally friendly versions of the digipack (the current digipack format already reduces emissions by two-thirds compared with the jewel case)

So the call to action is right there. As Tony Wadsworth put it at the event “I don’t see that there has to be a dichotomy between commercial goals and environmental goals, especially if we take a long term view”. Quite right too, especially when consumers would support packaging changes. Julie’s Bicycle has set out a roadmap for change with the ultimate goal of discontinuing the jewel case. In 2009 the major labels and Beggars Group have set a target to reduce emissions by 10%.

As for artists, ask any A&R or marketing exec, manager or indeed artist, which packaging they prefer. It’s a no brainer – artists would kiss goodbye to the jewel case in a second (probably preferring some ridiculously expensive alternative such as embroidered velvet, but hey, they care!). Beggars Group claims that nine out of ten artists request alternative packaging for their releases.

It’s about time we retired an old, much-hated, faulty product. I say product, because for some consumer goods, the product is the packaging! Packaging plays a key role in music – with CD buyers firmly attached to liner notes, artwork and tangibility. Putting music into beautiful but responsible boxes sets a great agenda in extending the lifecycle of the industry’s core product. After all, just letting the CD wither on the vine until we wait for digital revenues to materialize is a do nothing option that won't be enough in the longer term.

Music's changing product

[This post appeared in last week's Record of the Day as the Insight piece, just here in case you didn't catch it...]

A few years back I came up with an idea for a label, to present its pipeline as an online feature, called the 'Creative Curve'. The idea was to show a curve or spectrum with all the key creative points along it as a music project was being created - writing, recording, mixing, releasing, promoting and touring. For each point along the curve there would be a featured artist project at that stage of development.

The idea was meant to build anticipation, provide fans with an insight into the creative process (for example to see how artists work differently and handle those points along the curve with whatever degree of joy or dread) and potentially to offer products or at least promotional clips such as demos, song stems, interviews etc. which could also be widely syndicated to other digital platforms.

The idea didn't fly, since everything the label did needed to be artist-specific, not label specific. Also, there was a concern that opening up the creative process in this way would spoil the mystery and annoy the artists. In the end the will to mix up the product in this way wasn't there at the time, but things have moved on at a pace since then.

Indeed, there has been a constant, breathless innovation to the way music is being released to consumers. In recent weeks we’ve had the first pixel-interactive video, with Empire Of The Sun's new single, a new band More Than Thieves recording and releasing four exclusive sessions for each major streaming service, and another couple of high value box set packages from the likes of Metric and The Smashing Pumpkins. Meanwhile, some long-established artists have really been ripping up the rule book on what the ‘music product’ is, although I almost hesitate to mention the usual suspects since they get referenced everywhere (which is perhaps partly the intention – to capture our collective attention). No, I will not mention Trent Reznor in a piece about digital product. Doh!

To some extent these initiatives could all be categorised as promotion – an expanding array of gimmicks designed to shout the loudest to simply do what the industry has always done – “work the album”. But there's more to it than that. Music, it seems, is constantly in search of a new way to present and package itself now that the album has been de-coupled and the physical product is being slowly but surely eroded.

The business 101 book says that when a core product is being devalued and commoditised the only way forward is to build new products, services and experiences around what was the old cash cow (in our case, albums) and meanwhile milk that cow dry. Other sectors have made successes in doing just this - indeed it’s been the raison d'être of Richard Branson’s Virgin brand for some time – it’s how flying got a makeover for example.

Entertainment industries have had makeovers too. HBO did it for TV and Marvel did it for its catalogue of super-heroes - they transformed their respective industry’s products and allowed them to flourish whatever new distribution channels emerged. The movie business is currently working through product transformation via digital projection and 3D film.

With music, it's been harder to tell how to respond to the impact of technology and the resulting changes in consumer behaviours. Piracy, other entertainment products, digital distribution and now apps, have all shaken up consumption to the point where consumers seem to spend more time searching, writing about or playing with music than actually listening to it. The term the 'Kodak moment' just doesn't do music justice. What Kodak went through was child's play compared with the current challenge of music producers.

Arguably, those producers have placed too much attention on distribution, with little genuine sustainable value created from this. It has taken too long to switch focus to the obvious – music the product.

But with new product innovations now arriving that seems to be changing. We have high-end physical album packages that come with a range of valued extras including even gig tickets, like Metric & Smashing Pumpkins mentioned above. Some debut artists like Laura Marling did it with her ‘Song Box’ release of Alas I Cannot Swim. Radiohead really got that ball rolling. The much talked about release of In Rainbows skewered the two polarising trends in music consumption: digital - get it now, get it cheap, no frills - serving one end of the scale and the £40 box set serving the other. Clinical, simple, genius marketing.

Audio-visually music has come on leaps & bounds despite the reduction in the volume of expensively made promos. Again, the music video market has widened to cover lo-if or user generated low cost clips for YouTube to high brow art films for theatrical distribution, such as The Arctic Monkeys Live at the Apollo and Wilco’s two great movie projects. Artists at all ends of the spectrum are creating interesting film product, from U2's recent arty collaboration with Anton Corbin to Conor Oberst’s superb recent touring film.

Despite being in the eye of the hurricane, the pop song itself hasn't changed, although the singles format has actually benefited. Meanwhile albums seem to have remained intact, my own theory (statistically unproven) being that albums have both shortened and improved as a ‘natural response’ to current market pressures. With ever more music products growing around the core song & album formats, two things need to happen to affect a notable shift in the commercial fortunes of music:

1. High-end physical product will need to become more standard rather than ‘special edition’. This will extend the physical life-cycle for music across all demographic groups that value physical product, be it CD, vinyl or USB. This would take investment on the industry’s behalf but will pay-off over the long-term. Besides, standard CDs are just not good enough for modern day consumers.

2. More & more peripheral content – film, video, apps etc. should be packaged & offered commercially as product, not purely in the name of promotion – after all, what exactly is being promoted these days except an ever-reducing sales yield for the standard CD?

There has been an ongoing debate in the convergence era as to what is King, content or distribution. To my mind it is clear, content wins, distribution is just access to content. People will always want music content and will pay for the privilege, but music the product has to change and improve with the times. Consumers appreciate that more than anything.

[See also http://www.creativereview.co.uk/crblog/what-no-jewel-case/]

Will all CDs go The Way of the Shed?

It’s just been the May bank holiday weekend in the UK and I undertook to do some typical bank holiday weekend stuff, including clearing out my garden sheds (that’s right, I have two! Yes I’m aware this is a seriously privileged over-allocation of sheds).

This involved the usual detritus... a decrepit lawnmower, baby & toddler instruments with bits missing, hundreds of dead spiders and much worse, a few live ones as well.

Inevitably it also involved CDs. Lots and lots of CDs, hundreds in fact, boxed up randomly – all but abandoned - a travesty of wasted plastic. Most of the CD cases are cracked of course and they generally don’t look attractive – what a faulty product when you really think about it.

I cleared a shelf unit at the back and unloaded the boxes – anything to make extra space. My god, look at this! I never even played half of these all the way through. Here’s a random sample:

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club – their over-rated, over-hyped debut (mind you, their 3rd album Howl is on my ‘classics’ shelf)

Teenage Fanclub – Bandwagonesque – isn’t this said to be a classic? – might have to revisit soon
Diesel Park West – Shakespeare Alabama – as above

Grandaddy – Sumday –I do remember being distinctly underwhelmed by this

John Frusciante – Shadows Collide With People – I think this is his 25th solo record, doesn’t he make an album a month or something?

Aha – Minor Earth Major Sky – This has a great B side on it called Barely Hanging On, but as an album it’s hardly up there alongside the likes of Scoundrel Days (or lost A-ha classic Memorial Beach)

Athlete – Tourist – their overly ambitious and eventually career limiting second – it contains literally one good song. Athlete, if you’re still out there, please go back to being the real you!

P.I.L – Greatest Hits – surely this has some crackers on it

Jerry Cantrell – Boggy Depot – what? How many solo albums do I have by guitarists from old-favourite heavy rock bands? I almost certainly paid well over a tenner for this. What was I thinking?

Gomez – Liquid Skin – One-time-lauded indie golden boys, they have actually just released a new record I see

Terrorvision – Regular Urban Survivors – assume this was a bad mistake attempt at a guilty pleasure – you can’t deny they had a sense of humour though (check out Superchronic and Bad Actress for example)

The National – Boxer – wasn’t this on several blog best of lists a few years back? If so what’s it doing in the shed? Maybe it’s a spare copy. Note-to-self - Mistaken for Strangers and Guest Room must be ripped & re-engaged with asap

Guilty Pleasures Rides Again – got to be something here for the bank holiday barbeque playlist surely

Etc.

What are these fit for now?

Since there’s a set of old Mordant Short stand up speakers in here and an old amp and CD deck, I could set it all up and spend the month of May on a nostalgia trip. I’ve got the urge to just select a disc at random, and play through my favourite track from it. That might be a fun way to squeeze some value out of this motley collection. But I don’t have time for that.

I could just throw them in a box and take them down to the next car boot sale (yard sale US readers). But I don’t even think I’d get a punter for them these days. Ten years ago I did do this and the CDs sold out rapidly (a pound for three). But these days, it’s probably only old mobile handsets and iPods that fetch decent prices.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could claim a refund on CDs you never got value from? I’d be in for a good few hundred pounds cash-back on this set (which I would happily spend on new music of course). Maybe there could be an industry recycle scheme whereby you can trade in the CD and get the download version for free, or maybe exchange an old CD album for one new download track?

At least I should spend an hour with the laptop in here ripping a select bunch of tracks into my iTunes library – the Shed Playlist Spring 2009. That’ll work. I’ve created something out of it after all.

Ways of Listening

As I sorted through the piles, I thought about how varied our listening habits have become as consumers and how it all started not with digital but with the CD. One friend of mine, back in University days, would get his new CD home, shove it in the deck and promptly skip through it one track at a time, previewing each song. “How can you do that?” I would say in disgust, “you’re spoiling it for yourself, have some patience man”. And this was ten years before 30 second clips! He always was a futuristic thinker.

Another friend took it to the furthest extreme the other way. Whenever he acquired the new release disc of one of his favourite artists, he would first insist to take it upon himself to play back the entire catalogue of that artist, in chronological order. “Unrealistically obsessive, mate”, was my considered response to that one.

I fell in between these two extremes, always insisting to myself that I wait for the opportunity to playback in full any new CD purchase, on the hi-fi, not headphones. Of course, this hardly ever happened due to the ever dwindling amount of free time, hence not listening to half these abandoned CDs in my shed.

Just lately, I have actually been buying more downloads, mainly from 7 Digital. You can’t argue with the prices (many new releases on ‘sale’ at £5) and the 356 bit rate MP3’s sound pretty good to me. I miss the tactile quality of CD packaging of course and still go for some stuff on CD (recently Metric, Spoon, some classic back catalogue by Talk Talk). But after an experience like this weekend, it might be more downloads from now on and a little less plastic.

The future of music is: Filtered

[this post is featured as the comment editorial in this week's indespensible UK-based Record of the Day http://www.recordoftheday.com weekly magazine and is part 1 of 2 posts on innovation in music. Next week's focuses on music the product].



If the music industry is changing so much, how come the biggest promotional platforms for bands are still mainstream media - radio, press, TV and The Charts? It might be tempting to think that it’s because music label marketing is so steeped in the tradition of radio, press, TV and The Charts that they know not much else. But this is no longer true, especially in labels where digital specialists beaver away on this or that initiative for new music campaigns via apps platforms, social networks, e-tailers and blogs.

The simple fact is that radio (followed by TV) is still where the majority of consumers say they discover new music – at least it is when you look at research tracking by the likes of NPD, Viacom etc. I find that remarkable in this day & age, but the point where this changes is when it gets really interesting for music and for the way music is marketed.

It might even be the point where the business itself finally tips into a new paradigm where radio and TV matters less than digital media, or even doesn’t matter much at all. Some artists have already reached that point, such as Ingrid Michaelson, with 250k album sales and 800k downloads with barely a mainstream murmur. Indie band Metric has had recent similar success.



The reason is that many fans have reached that point too. Forward moving artists will concern themselves less with a radio-led charm offensive and more with a fan-base-building digital campaign along the lines of Michaelson.

It is in many ways surprising that mainstream media is still seen as the golden ticket to success, when we’ve had some ten years of development in digital. But then, since digital only represents just one fifth of industry revenues, perhaps it isn’t surprising at all. The business will still focus supply and marketing activities firmly towards where consumers discover the product and spend the cash.

However, over the next year or so, there are some clear signs of a more full-tilt transition to digital. An obvious one is the increasingly moribund physical retail space – you can’t buy CDs if there’s nowhere left to shop for them. Another is breakthrough digital only applications including of course, Spotify and applications platforms like the iPhone.

But what could make a greater single impact than these factors combined is if music discovery really came on leaps & bounds, digitally. It has been threatening to for a while of course, with numerous recommendation engines (most notably Last.fm) and music social networks emerging as more effective music discovery platforms than radio and retail for a sizeable segment of music fans. Such services have certainly improved upon the basic search capabilities that drove earlier generations of music services, including of course P2P.

But for all their clever functionality, no recommendation engine or social network has become the music discovery standard in the way radio has. This is for a variety of reasons: algorithms are yet to work perfectly as filters for music (if they ever will); recommendation results are still a bit hit & miss; social networks like last.fm are a bit too cluttered for mainstream use. Blog aggregators and blogs are too specialist.

But there are a number of ways in which music discovery will change in the next year or two that will collectively make a huge difference:

1. Music crawlers and mega-charts. Going beyond the boundaries of any one social network or just crawling blogs, combined web crawler services that cover all the major metrics of play-counts, profile views, search-terms, twitters etc. – for both bands and songs – will aggregate everything and provide constantly refreshed mega charts to replace the traditional charts as we know them. The BBC’s Sound Index was pioneering for band buzz, but for a more focused application of the concept take a look at We Are Hunted (wearehunted.com). Fresh out of Australia this web crawler amasses all into the 99 most popular tracks of each day, presented in a simple 9-track-a-page format with a stream & buy button on each & every track.
   
2. Social programming. So-called fourth generation discovery after the first three generations: 1. The EPG; 2. Search and 3. Recommendation. Go Fish and You Tube already pioneered social programming to some extent, allowing individual users to programme & broadcast very simple personal video channels. Now iLike & Facebook have really opened up social programming in audio. I’ve been sceptical about this - who wants to discover content through a multitude of individually programmed channels? I wasn’t sure until I tried Peoples Music Store (peoplesmusicstore.com), which I think is a fun and very social way to discover (and even shop for) new music. Judging by this week’s news, Universal music agrees, licensing some 300,000 songs to the service.
   
3. People, places & lifestyle. Geo-location technologies will allow users to use their mobiles to filter all sorts of content by location, timing and lifestyle preferences. Imagine a playlisting application that can give you a playlist relevant to a business trip you are taking today, or the mood you’re in as you are stuck in your tinderbox on the M1 on a hot sunny day.
   
4. Personalised home pages. This one is for the ISP’s to crack, although iTunes really should have done it ages ago as well. The BBC and Google are masters of it. You really don’t have to bother going anywhere for discovery other than your own personalised homepage of your preferred access provider. The likes of Sky, Virgin & BT are developing it as the holy-grail for their multi-platform customers.
   
5. New content brands. In many ways the antidote to all that goes above, new content brands are old fashioned, trusted editorial brands that thrive digitally due to their expertise in exploiting long-tail content, reduced barriers to entry and targeting of audiences previously underserved by mainstream media platforms. Think Lost Tunes, Mondomix, Pitchfork, eMusic, Daytrotter et al. Established Blogs and even Brands that do it well can create new preferred destination services for digital users.

With all this space for music discovery to develop it keeps me optimistic for generating new opportunities to drive more immediate consumption – transactional as well as streaming. Current discovery platforms like YouTube, Pandora, Last.fm & Spotify aren’t necessarily good purchase drivers for music, but that doesn’t mean new ones won’t in the future.

Marketing the mid-tail: how the business must do more for great records by established bands

In 2007 Turin Brakes released the album Dark On Fire. Have you heard it? It's a great record. Great tunes (hardly a weak moment among the entire 12 track set), heartfelt lyrics, superb musicianship and a wonderful sound. It represents a career high for a band which, until then - despite a couple of hits - had just trudged along – for three albums. But they still just trudge along, the issue being that nowhere near enough people heard or bought Dark On Fire.

Every music fan has a list of albums like this. Records they love, play to everybody they know and talk about a lot, but no-one else actually has. As for record companies, well, they have a shed load of unsuccessful records of course - at least 20 misses for every hit – that's the standard business model. But each label also has a good bunch of skeletons in the cupboard –great records that sold next to nothing. It's how a lot of artist and label relationships come to an end, when the label decides it has done everything in its power to take the band to the next level, but it just hasn't worked.

Now of course, I realise that sadly, we don't exist in a world where talent rises biologically to the top. The entertainment world is many things but Darwinian in nature it isn't. From time-to-time, positively vacuous movies, books and records make massive global hits – hardly anyone seems to truly understand why this happens. Meanwhile, genuine works of art go unwatched, unread and unheard. That's just the way of things in entertainment media. In some ways you have to have more admiration for people who do produce the big blockbuster hits – they somehow captured the public's collective imagination, or lack of it – a true marketing skill.

But in this case I'm talking about neither the hits or the obscure, out-of-time lost classics. I'm talking about great records by established, if not yet superstar bands. Subjectivity is not the issue here. When you are a producer of records day in day out, you know when your charges have created something special. Dark On Fire was Turin Brakes out of their skin. Last month I wrote about Starsailor's All The Plans – again, out of their skin. You simply cannot argue with genuinely good song writing and execution by bands that already have a proven track record. But then, these great records still bomb – and quite often. Why? It's a question bands, managers and labels should investigate, post-mortem, government-enquiry, coroners-inquest style.

The first problem is of course, that it’s hard to determine any one factor contributing to the lack of deserved success. But if anything, suspect number one will be lack of radio support. The radio has so much to answer for in the workings of the modern mainstream music business. Any marketing executive from outside the music business is vexed and slightly amused by the relationship between records and radio. Certain bands occupy radio slots like they own them, whether or not they release a good single or a stinker. Meanwhile whole swathes of new bands and great new sounds can't get a look in, certainly not across daytime slots. Frankly, if a total overhaul of the relationship between music & radio was called for, that wouldn't be a bad thing in my book.

But lack of radio support can't be an excuse for a failed marketing campaign – not these days. Radio might still be where the casual majority hear new music, but digital platforms register the most growth in influence, especially for the under 30s demographic. Digital platforms are more fragmented than radio in terms of audience reach, but for a new artist, they represent a greater opportunity in aggregate than chasing precious, unobtainable radio slots.

The next culprit is the supply system itself. Release schedules are crammed (especially the notoriously over-crowded 4th quarter) and physical music retail is in complete disarray. If you are not a superstar act in the promotional stratosphere (and if you were you would probably be taking up way more than your entitled share of TV & radio-slots and retail space) you can only hope that enough supporters somewhere along the value chain will champion you to the point where the punters take note.

Suspect number three might be the artist themselves. Are they willing to go the extra mile for their baby? Get off a high horse or two perhaps? Really work it – blood, sweat, tears? I wouldn't blame artists for complaining about promo schedules in the way Paul McCartney did before the release of Memory Almost Full (through Starbucks). Macca, at sixty-odd, was willing to work as hard as any artist one third his age, but was simply crying out for something different to do other than hawk himself around an endless circuit of radio and TV stations. Apart from a few genuine over-precious cases, the artist is not culpable.

Finally, the last suspects are consumers. Like the radio, they (we) also have a lot to answer for. A large chunk of the record buying public (deliberately chosen anachronism there) are lazy in the extreme. That's party how some superstar acts get away with somewhat rocky creative periods – the people continue to buy their stuff because that's all they know! Fact: the number one reason people claim they don't by as much music as they should – lack of information – they don't know what to buy. They are quite literally stuck in a groove.

It seems to me that if every record released has to go Route 1 through radio, TV and retail in a vain attempt to reach a respectable chart position, many genuinely good albums will simply fall by the wayside. There simply are not enough effective media or retail slots available to every record justice.

So what's the answer to maximising a great record in these days of fragmented mainstream media but ubiquitous, commoditised music?

At the risk of being coy about potential solutions to this I am going to be deliberately careful here. I've already littered previous posts with potential routes to market for new bands, but for established bands (with or without record deals) it is in many ways trickier. You have history to contend with. When you're on the 3rd or 4th album bands tend to have a certain vibe going on with the media – who either will still feel goodwill towards the band or will have become long since bored. If it's the latter you are dead through this route, try the alternatives:

Digital + Live

While record labels have marketing departments and talk about getting records to market, a lot of the mainstream activity isn't really marketing as such, but promotion. Even established bands should go back to roots, focusing around a combination of web & live, where fan data can be combined with a deeper connection to the artist and the scarcity of the live performance.

There can be few better examples of working web & live than The Script, signed to the Sony label. But the Script is a new group, not established. For an established band to do the equivalent, they would need to accept the idea of touring much more extensively, perhaps taking residences in smaller venues and/or taking the support slot for a superstar act. More touring festivals could work well here, especially in the current value-seeking climate.

Marketing not promotion

There are occasional examples of record campaigns that look more like marketing in that the approach is either more subtle or radical than simply scatter-gunning (or if you have a bigger budget, carpet-bombing) media placements. For example, Radiohead's approach with In Rainbows was to radically alter the marketing mix – in this case price and place. Coldplay chose a classic give-away-the-song-to-sell-the-album, but also went for a pretty startling art and styling theme – risky but clever, since rarely do big artists choose to radically alter their image. But these are superstar acts of course, not the immediate subject here. It's harder to find examples of marketing innovation lower down the food chain.

Look out for The Hours' current campaign. Here the band – second album in - leverages its relationship with a 3rd party – in this case the artist Damian Hirst – to achieve something different. The Hours has teamed up with The Guardian & Observer Music Monthly (also note, a good audience fit for the band) for the launch of new album See The Light. The Observer and Guardian ran a month-long teaser campaign offering consumers the chance to win a Damien Hirst original piece around the album's cover theme. Just how much it built anticipation for the album is harder to tell though.

What's the rush?

Finally, the slow-burn must come into it. With most album campaigns spanning not much more than a quarter-year, truly great records may not have time to reach the audiences deserved before attention spans waver on behalf of everyone involved - except the potential audience. As a listener, I don't care whether a record is new or not - it's new to me that's the important thing. This shouldn’t happen for the best records - grind it out for the best. It didn’t for Elbow’s Seldom Seen Kid - now bring back the 18-month long album campaign!

Music discovery Spoon fed, courtesy Daytrotter

Do you ever become utterly gripped by just one song? This one song becomes your adopted theme tune of choice, pushing aside all other songs in your current consciousness. More than that, the song seems to be a perfectly apt soundtrack – a response, to just about everything that happens to be going on in your life. You literally can’t get the song out of your head and don’t want to, necessarily.

That’s happened to me very occasionally and it happened all last week. The song is by Spoon and it’s called “The Ghost of You Lingers”. It’s from their last album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, though I only just came across it.

This track has infected me. There’s something strangely compelling about it – the way it pulses nervously, urgently along (the keyboard on the track is used as a rhythm instrument, which is a sound I have always been attracted to). It’s experimental in structure, but melodic too – nearly all of the melody supplied by the vocal. I don’t think I could ever get bored of listening to this track. It is however, a bit menacing – it’s an anxiety trip – especially with some weird interference sound buzzing towards the end (this is what first caught me ear with the track).

The lyrics and the music could not be any more together. And the lyrics are to a pop song what Pinter prose is to a play. There’s something mysterious going on with this song. The singer’s voice is concerned, reflective. The lyrics are a riddle:

Put on a clinic till we hit the wall
Just like a sailor with his wounds being salted
Come on
I had a nightmare nothing could be put back together
Would you settle the score?
If you were here
Would you calm me down?
The ghost of you lingers
It lingers
And I always think about it

A little detailed so far I know, but stay with me. A little cursory interweb research unveils the impact on the world of “Ghost of You Lingers” and it is not insignificant. A (what looks like an unofficial art) video for the track is approaching 111k views on YouTube. But on the band’s current Myspace page, the track clocks up over 635k plays – and has over 470k on Last.fm - so plenty of web activity around this track.


Daytrotter - new music, timeless values

But I didn’t discover the track on these titans of web music real estate. I found it on Daytrotter.com. And Daytrotter has amazed me these past few weeks I can tell you. I first came across it after reading about it in Chris Salmon’s ‘Click-to-Download’ column in the Guardian’s Music & Film supplement.

The concept is beautifully simple. Band’s drop by The Horseshack studios in Rock Island, Illinois (while passing through on US tours) and record a 4-5 track session – usually new or recent material – sometimes un-released songs. The session tracks are offered as free MP3 downloads and the site itself is funded through banner advertising (it wouldn’t be right somehow for audio ads to be part of this set up).

Now I’m pretty late to this party. Daytrotter has been going since 2006 and with the frequency of one band every day, has amassed an impressive session archive – all of which is still available for download. I have been like a kid let loose at the pick ‘n mix counter the past couple of weeks raiding this archive. It’s hard to distinguish which sessions are best – that depends on your tastes. But if it’s any help at all, I have listed below my favourite ten songs I’ve been living with lately from the Daytrotter sessions, including the Spoon song.

[Btw, you'll have finished with the YouTube Spoon clip now, so click on the Daytrotter radio player on the right to stream Lonely Dear - number 2 in my Daytrotter session top ten].

I don’t often gush about individual music services on the JB blog so now to the justification to do so with Daytrotter. Daytrotter isn’t just another music blog. It’s done with such care, and so nicely wrapped in its own indie music ethos, it’s immediately attractive for fans of this type of music. And it’s sticky as hell - I just can’t stop dropping by on the site to see who has recorded a new session. It’s marvellous for real, lasting discovery and connection – I’ve found Spoon, Ingrid Michaelson and The Local Natives on there and I suspect I will listen to a lot more by each of them and many others.

The sessions themselves are quite something. I’m not really one for live session content, but something about the setting or the atmosphere or something definitely rubs off on the artists who record for Daytrotter. They seem to put in real performances and the sessions sound great – warm and capturing plenty of subtleties in the music – credit to both the artists and to the studio's sound engineers. These are so much better than your run-of-the-mill promo-circuit radio show sessions where the artist just shows up and plays with half their usual players or equipment and then have to suffer the DJ concluding with a cringe-worthy “that was just fantastic” (awkward moment of radio silence follows).

In short, the recordings made here are well worth the effort in downloading, listening and keeping. I’ve talked a lot in this blog about how the music industry desperately needs new content brands – nicely curated, edited and presented – in a way we the fans come to know, love and trust. I can think of very few that have so far emerged in the digital music space so far.

I wrote about Lost Tunes last month (which won a Music Week award last week, congratulations). I’ve featured Calabash-Mondomix as well. Pitchfork certainly qualifies these days as do a number of the more established music blogs (though these lack a substantial archive). Such music editorial brands are so few and far between however.

But Daytrotter is my new favourite music brand. I can’t see me getting bored of something so lovingly put together and superbly well executed. It’s so simple. Not only is the music great, but the editorial features written by founder Sean Moeller are briefly diverting and fun to read. A strong voice that’s never dull, and sure does justice to its quirky and individual subjects. The other aspects to the site work fine too – a radio player, some video, a cartoon strip, a merch shop. And it’s all beautifully signatured by Johnie Cluney’s highly attractive artwork. Everything about it smacks of an effortless (and perhaps even accidental) focus.

And in this focus is a great model for all of the endless technology-driven music services that show up week in week out and mostly, depart quietly sometime later by the rear exit. Being a valid, lasting contributor to the changing face of music discovery doesn’t have to mean a gargantuan library with all the music ever made, or the latest whizz bang recommendation engine that can rip that library apart with an algorithm.

Put some thought into it. Think about your audience, think about your artists, and think about how you can add real value to their needs in connecting. Word of mouth will do much of the rest.

I’d love to see Daytrotter move up to a gallop, perhaps syndicating its content onto the bigger music or ISP platforms so desperate for character development. But the Daytrotter crew aren’t as consumed by ambition as I am. By e-mail I asked Sean Moeller what his longer-term ambitions for the service are. His response was “long term goals are just to continue doing what we're doing really”. Once again, focus.

My top ten digital tracks from the sizeable archive:

1. Spoon. “The Ghost of You Lingers”.
2. Lonely Dear. “I Was Only Going Out”. (embedded for your listening pleasure).
3. The Maccabees. “Precious Time”.
4. The Local Natives. “Airplanes”.
5. Aimee Mann. “Little Tornadoes”.
6. Spanish Prisoners. “Mantequilla”.
7. Ingrid Michaelson. “Breakable”.
8. Death Cab For Cutie. “Styrofoam Cup”.
9. Foals. “Jam (Figure#3)”.
10. Deerhunter. “Dr. Glass”.

A cure for industry breakdown - Elbow grease

I just checked on Elbow's UK sales for The Seldom Seen Kid, which have just cruised past the 500k mark. When I first posted on Elbow's momentum and the contributing factors to it back in September, sales had just past 150k. But Fiction boss Jim Chancellor confidently suggested the album would reach platinum. I believed him. I suggested an arena or two might be in the offing at last? It was in plan said Jim – and was signed, sealed and delivered with aplomb at their triumphant Wembley show a couple of weeks back (my music mistake of the year so far: not attending that show).

At that time the band had just won the Mercury Music Prize, so platinum sales and arena shows looked very much on, but even Chancellor probably wouldn't have bet on a Brit, which the band won in February. And so, Elbow was resurrected from a languishing obscurity. Their wonderful, but very 'unpop' Seldom Seen Kid Album has become popular (let's not overdo it, The Seldom Seen Kid ranked 35th best-selling album for 2008, though is by far the most 'progish' repertoire on that list) and will probably tick-over into double-platinum (UK sales of 600k) at some stage this year.

This is all great of course, with the band themselves and Garvey in particular, seemingly able to enjoy their long-awaited success with a lovely humbleness – basking in it without melting in it, and at the same time none of the awkward embarrassment that can often come when 'indie' bands break into the mainstream. When Garvey says “it's been good being me of late” on his 6 Music show (if you haven't discovered it yet, do, it's a genuine radio gem) it comes across as genuine appreciation.

Better than great in fact, Elbow's success is refreshing. The sometimes cynical UK music press has launched no backlash at all, not a hint of it. Instead, just continued good will. I've yet to come across one hard core Elbow fan to reel from their mainstream success. Maybe in these hard times, a little glory to the underdog is simply appreciated. Of course, the whole episode is underpinned by sheer quality. Listening to “Grounds For Divorce” and “Weather To Fly” this week, those two tracks are still revealing new qualities to me now, 18 months after first hearing them, and listening to them lots.

Elbow's success is now widely recognised and often referenced. In reviews for new releases by Starsailor, Doves and The Hours (all of which are very good records) you'll find obvious references to Elbow as unlikely but welcome trailblazers. I've been thinking though, could Elbow's success have a greater significance for the music business itself? It has certainly lifted the mood (as well as raised the stakes) in many record label marketing camps for other indie bands. In these hard times that is much appreciated. Perhaps there is now room for a bit of confident swagger in the way the campaigns for these records are executed. People really want this stuff! And there's no doubt The Seldom Seen Kid has nicely created a public appetite for more of it.

Being both fun and serious and about it, Elbow's success has scratched some very stubborn itches that have plagued the ailing record business for quite a while:

• Labels: Think the 18 month long album campaign is dead in the age of immediacy and music-streaming-file-sharing ubiquity? Not necessarily - The Seldom Seen Kid


• New bands: Can you survive in the cut & thrust of today's ruthless business, with one or two album deals and at best, three-strikes-before-your out? You just might – Elbow


• Old bands: In the hole? Sales & audiences falling despite delivering your best work? Past your prime but not past your best? Do carry on – Elbow!


• Fans: Think the age where you go to a gig and hear a charismatic front man not only talk between songs, but actually say something entertaining and informative (possibly to you directly?) are sadly gone? No! - Guy Garvey – man of the people and master of audience participation


• Music press, retailers: Think bands that don't erm, scrub up too well, will struggle to find a large audience through mainstream media? Not always – Elbow!


• Everybody: Think a complex, melancholy 'unpop' record can't become a mainstream blockbuster hit? Wrong – The Seldom Seen Kid


• Everybody: Think a band with a terribly dull name will struggle to catch on? Wrong – Elbow! (okay, there's also Coldplay, Oasis etc.).

But where does Elbow go from here? What's next? Obviously there's the question of America and subsequent global super-stardom. What about Elbow The Movie? Personally I would love to see something done in the spirit of Wilco's “I'm Trying to Break Your Heart” or “Ashes of American Flags”. I'll be there for the theatrical release and the DVD, and the coffee table book.

Probably best of all, this band of 18 years in the making, that have worked blood, sweat & tears and must have been several times on the brink of throwing in the towel, is currently writing a new album and no doubt, will make several more after that. That way, they don't miss out on anything and nor do we. At least something in the music business is working.