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.

Quick & dirty digital state of the nation #1: Music’s future face-off - Streaming vs. Transactions

By almost popular request, this is number one of two brief posts forming a digital state-of-the-nation, so we can move on to see what could happen next and more importantly, in a post or two’s time, look at who actually decides what can happen next.

I occasionally write about music on this blog, not just the business of music. If I were to write about music that interests you, what are you most likely to do? a) park it for later/never b) stream some of the songs I mention on Spotify c) buy the music from a digital music store. File-sharing isn’t an option I’ll include for now but obviously if you really wanted to, you could. If I really wanted to know the answer I could add a voting widget on the blog, but the question is actually kind of rhetorical.

But it is no less critical for that. With Spotify probably coming in somewhere close to 1.5 million unique users by now, ad-funded streaming seems to have momentum, so you might answer b) stream it. On the other hand, if you have been persuaded by any of the arguments & threads on this blog at all, you might well opt for c) buy it. I’ve posted several times on the limitations of streaming for music discovery and enjoyment, but also many times on the lack of inspiration to buy digital. But both are accepted options on the future of recorded music’s rather limited, menu. The technology evangelists will insist that transactions aren’t even on the menu at all – and they are quite wrong about that.

State of the Nation for Digital Music: Streaming vs. Transactions

First, streaming music. Consumers love streaming when it’s free. The first generation of subscription-based streaming services (led by Rhapsody) found a limited niche. Even the free ad-funded options later released by Rhapsody & Napster couldn’t take them into the mainstream. The second generation ad-funded streaming services really worked. Last.fm gained traction as a music social network & recommendation service then introduced full-track streaming. iMeem followed. Then Spotify took off and flew in the UK and Europe.

So far so good, except for the weaknesses in music streaming we are learning more about as things unfold: the business model. It’s tough, tough, tough. These services pay the labels advances and the publishers per stream, and now operate in a recession where ad-funding isn’t flowing into digital platforms like it did last year. This has had a lot of coverage in the past few weeks but was first exposed by on Michael Robertson’s blog over a year ago.

Consumers won’t pay in numbers for streaming or recommendation. They will tolerate some advertising if the trade-off seems reasonable. They have yet to really work out how streaming music for free impacts on their overall, long-term music consumption, but the chances are they will use streaming services to listen to a greater variety of music and take the risk out of music purchases. Since this means more time listening than shopping, that will inevitably mean less music purchases.

Now, since I posted last time on this subject of streaming outweighing transactions, Spotify has done an affiliate deal with & Digital whereby all the tracks on Spotify are one or maybe two clicks away from being purchased. Good stuff. So is the problem solved? Not really. Streaming on Spotify is quite passive, quite lean back. It is unlikely users will stream on Spotify to screen music prior to any kind of purchase and then go ahead with gusto to 7 digital to buy. It’s unlikely that stream-like-buy will establish itself as a major pattern of consumer behaviour. The instant buy button for music was always overrated.

Now to transactions. Why do we buy a piece of music? We’ve been conditioned to and that trend is ingrained and is still strong – if you are over 30 at least. For under 30s not so strong perhaps, but still very much present. But plenty of under 30s music fans prefer CD to digital, which seems weird but is logical. We’ll buy digital because it’s quicker than physical, usually – slightly more convenient and slightly cheaper. Now DRM is gone it’s less risky & confusing.

We mostly buy digital to add to a device, hence iTunes has the market sewn up, occupying 80% of a large niche. As opposed to streaming, all second generation market entrants have struggled like hell. Smaller brands have made no headway into iTunes market share and Amazon & Play have done okay with aggressive pricing but not shifted the needle for the market, really.

Interestingly, none of these digital stores have introduced the ability for customers to stream the songs in full before they buy. Unlike the streamers introducing click-to-buys, these established retailers know the game too well to expect full sampling to shift their sales up. It’s likely to go the other way, they know that.

On the other hand the innovation in the transaction market has been poor compared with streaming. iTunes isn’t sexy anymore it’s a 7-11. DRM got stripped, so what. Genius is okay but not game changing. Differential pricing isn’t the same as dynamic pricing and it looks like it will leverage some standard prices up as well as down. Amazon has gone aggressive with pricing, not impressing anyone, much.

But there have been, and still are, some interesting takes on selling music. Amie Street’s dynamic pricing model. E-music’s hybrid, great value music club-type subscription for indie content. Some higher-quality & lossless song-file services etc. – all niche. We’ve had music market-places such as Burnlounge and now we have the Peoplesmusicstore (I like this, more about it in a later post).

Finally, as I wrote a few posts ago, some services are, at last, focusing around particular audiences and repertoire rather than getting hung-up on payment models - Lost Tunes for example.

That’s the digital market covered (minus file-sharing and a few mobile services, granted) – in total worth roughly $3billion, under one fifth of music and not making up for lost CD sales. Growth is slowing down already at around 25% in 2008. In short we’re in a bit of a spot. But it is early days let’s use this brief history to see what might happen next.

Digital Music: What happens next?

What we have to realise is that the consumer adoption curve is law. The mass market simply does not go for things that aren’t convenient, simple and good value compared with the alternative. We have no right to believe that digital will grow significantly unless we see greater innovation and value arrive on the supply side. There might not be one big breakthrough to rival iTunes initial impact, but some clear ways to go as follows, with my view on the medium-term (say five year) potential:

Ad-funded-streaming
The outlook isn’t too rosy. Is it really much more than personalised radio? With its simple functionality there isn’t room on the market for more than 2-3 key players and they’re already here, which becomes very challenging for new entrants like Myspace Music. Ad-funding on its own won’t sustain Spotify, but people love it, so a good chunk of users might be happy to pay around £2 per month to not have to live without it. Spotify might be able to earn £50m or so from direct subscriptions in addition to its ad-revenues. Medium-term potential: low

Music stores
Despite the dominance of iTunes there is still some ground to be made through targeting services better to audiences (particularly new digital adopters in the more mature demographic segments). See previous posts around product development in this area. Through more compelling services and some innovation around targeting the market for transactions could easily double, though in the longer term it depends how much music is commoditised in other ways. Potential: medium

Hybrid models
E-music was always a good idea, an innovative model. But it’s pricing is still way too aggressive for music producers and it is yet to convince the market that the ARPU model is an effective replacement for transactions. So it stays niche. But ISP’s (or even Spotify of Myspace) could offer a simple hybrid whereby 30 tracks per month are keep-able within a streaming subscription, maybe with some sharing capabilities. The pricing equation isn’t easy, but with a good value package and great presentation across multiple platforms this could shift the needle and could reach a hitherto indifferent digital consumer. Potential: high

Cloud-based models
These are still some way off. The cloud with everything available and consumers paying for access isn’t quite as inevitable as people think – it’s back to business models that actually work. Play Anywhere is an interesting B2B offer that bridges what we have now with some kind of future cloud-based mother jukebox but it’s too complex to be mass market. Potential: low

Recommendation
New technologies arrive weekly, but don’t seem to really get that much better. They come and go, with nothing making a mark more than Pandora or Last.fm has already. Even if someone perfected music recommendation it’s not something that consumers will pay for in itself and will not drive transactions for the same reason Spotify will struggle to – music purchases don’t work that way. Potential: low

Playlisting applications
On the brink for over a decade digitally, playlists have been a key music currency for as long as tapes existed. As with all things music though, what made mix tapes great – the time, thought and love it took to create them – has been commoditised by digital, with playlist services swamped with literally millions of crap compilations. Still, some services like Muxtape and Mixwit were built on traditional mix taping values and looked promising until licensing issues killed them off early. But now the labels are licensing project playlist, so the sector might yet deliver. Key to its potential are two factors: built-in natural friction on music use (keeping the industry comfortable and consumers tolerant) and the ability to offer great value since sales can be seen as incremental to all of the current product offers on the market, even commercial compilations. Potential: medium

Making it happen. Who decides?

I’m sure I’ve missed a few key developments above, but I hope to have demonstrated that there are plenty of elements that can still bring value to digital music and help the market grow significantly. However, most critical of all is how the various market players interact to bring these elements to consumers in coherent, sustainable ways. It’s the subject of the next post or one after so please keep a look out for it.

Spotify, 1000 songs & another paradigm shift for music? Probably not

All last week I was buying the Guardian and setting aside its (excellent) set of seven supplements of ‘1000 Songs Everyone Must Hear’. I’ve browsed through each of the seven categories: love, heartbreak, people & places, sex, protest & politics, life and death and party songs. These were really well put together and I found myself casually marking with a pencil the songs I wanted to hear – for the first time or again – in the old fashioned way (I haven’t done that since circling essential Christmas films in the Radio Times, centuries ago).

Being deliberately ruthless, I got to a tally of 49 songs that I became immediately interested in listening to. I virtually ignored the protest & politics section so it could’ve been higher. And like I said I was ruthless. My most popular category was heartbreak with 13 songs. That is irrelevant to but I thought I would share it with you anyway.

Now what’s missing from this story so far? Exactly right. Any intention on my behalf to buy the tracks.

Out of the 49 songs that caught my eye I already owned a copy of just over half of them, mostly strewn across my CD collection which spreads throughout lounge shelving (prime spot, my classics & recent bests), office shelving (current playlist, new releases, freebies) and boxed up in the shed (abandoned, just not forever). I had a handful of the 49 in my iTunes library, but since most were songs I hadn’t heard for ages - or at all - I’m unlikely to have them to hand.
With the sheer inconvenience associated with actually seeking out the 49 songs, the whole exercise was looking like a source of frustration - yet another small music project to put on hold.

But guess what? The people at the Guardian have, this time, been smart enough to link the series with a digital song platform, in this case Spotify. The Guardian’s (again, excellent) music blog has a simple hyperlink to Spotify under each song’s editorial. You can even copy & paste the HTML for a blog widget (I’ve installed one there on the right – my 13 irrelevant Heartbreak songs for you to check out).

Now, while this is fantastic and has indeed taken the inconvenience out of my little project perfectly, it also got me thinking about how the industry is making leaps & bounds forward so fast, that we might be missing a trick or two on route. Curiously, there is very little mention of the link anywhere on Spotify. Nor does The Guardian make it at all obvious in the published supplements. This seems to be either an unofficial arrangement, or a joint promotion done on the quiet (which kind of defeats the purpose doesn’t it?).

Two things occurred to me about this:

1. Here was an excellent chance to promote both The Guardian and Spotify (and for labels, the songs!), but even more critically, encourage consumer interaction between old & new media platforms (among a key high-value, mature consumer demographic to boot).
2. The link to Spotify made sense, but hang on a minute – Spotify is free – were there e-commerce, transactional opportunities missed here?

Both the above struck me as lost opportunities, with the latter a real issue in demonstrating how the digital music industry is currently positioned.

I’m still curious as to why it’s not made easier, in this digital day & age, for consumers to simply click-to-buy an album for which they have just read a glowing review. Last year I received some excellent music book gifts – Robert Dimmery’s ‘1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die’ and Garry Mulholland’s ‘This Is Uncool: The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk and Disco’. On reading both I became eager to check out a shed-load of music. But again, with no linked incentive to buy digitally anywhere connected to the publications, I ended up making a less than pertinent mental note and buying one or two CDs on Amazon.

Of my 49 songs, let’s say I would buy 20 (I would!). Why didn’t the Guardian link up with iTunes or Amazon, or 7 Digital, to offer a simple menu of purchase options: 20 songs for £9.99 say? Or how about the whole 1,000 songs categorised by the seven sections for £99? Higher quality song files with a glossy collector’s booklet? Make that £149. Whatever, you get the idea. We are talking nicely incremental sales here, so incentivised pricing would work extremely well for both consumers and suppliers.

I know about the technical issues – metadata, bandwidth, dynamic pricing – all surmountable. Publishing is an issue of course – again surmountable. The logistical issues are well worth sorting out for a better digital future anyhow.

So why don’t we see more of this? More fundamentally, why does the industry now seem to be steamrolling forward inexorably toward ad-funded streaming models before we have explored more innovative transactional models?

It’s a key question. Rather than debate about whether all-you-can-eat streaming cannibalises existing sales, what about the opportunity cost of transactional opportunities not yet explored?
I have read in recent weeks at least a dozen articles about how Spotify’s momentum and the growth of ad-funded streaming services is tipping consumer behaviour into a new paradigm of access, not ownership. Tosh! Kind of – of course there is some truth in it, but the real picture of changing music consumption habits is far more varied.

Streaming music services represent snacking on music, the equivalent of browsing in one of those super-fancy-stationary stores where everything looks enticing and is mostly very affordable. But since you don’t need any of it, you pick up & flip a few things around in your hands and then walk away, empty handed. Or maybe you remember you actually did go into the store because you needed a new notebook.

Spotify is a form of music discovery and consumption, not a panacea. It is fun, convenient and superbly ripe for the kind of editorial tie-ins like the one with ‘1000 Songs’. It’s even better for background streaming while working on the laptop. But I for one am not ready to walk away from music ownership because of it.

I want to commit to certain records knowing that the pay-off comes from repeated listening in a range of environments, situations and emotional states. Streaming services are a way of filtering through the tide of new music and a way of snacking on new stuff, but that’s not how you discover what your primary collection of music for life sounds like. It’s unlikely I would have discovered Wilco or Sparklehorse or Merz on a streaming player. I certainly would not have warmed to the new Starsailor or Adela Diane records through that medium.

As that consumer who wants the deeper connection with music – who seeks out the next life-affirming records that can make the difference, I’m still here waiting for a reason to have a digital music collection, and for reasons & incentives to buy more music digitally. Until then, it’ll be Spotify, CDs and live shows. Not a paradigm shift for me.

A weekly round-up of sorts

Well that was the week that was! I promised to post each day and did including this, a ‘cheat’ post in which I wanted to take a brief opportunity to explain The Brew itself. If you've been reading regularly, you will have ‘got it’ by now. The Brew is here to offer a deeper insight into music industry issues than you might get from mainstream press or even most specialist media blogs.

It is sometimes vaguely topical, but not news, since music industry news is so widely available. If you don't already take them you must seek out Digital Music News, Five-Eight, Hypebot, Coolfer and MusicAlly for timely & savvy insights on digital music issues. And for all-round music perspective, Record of the Day of course.

On Juggernaut, I'm trying to write about the fundamental issues in music & the music business mainly from a consumer perspective – one so easily forgotten in the relentless tide of new technology and corporate shenanigans. If I occasionally veer off to more into discussing music more than business I make no apology for that, since in the end it’s all about the music after all. And writing about music itself can bring about the best, deepest insights.

Very briefly on the name, which a few more curious folks have asked me about. Well, it was, somewhat fleetingly, going to be a blog about music AND coffee, which is another life necessity and great passion of mine. However, I quickly realised I know nothing about coffee or the business of coffee, so that was that. The play on words is derived from 2008’s theme tune to my life, Elbow’s ‘Bones Of You’ (from the now miraculously popular and no less superb for it ‘Seldom Seen Kid’) in which the highly-stressed protagonist is "charging around with a juggernaut brow" (roughly 20 seconds in). Juggernaut brow/brew (coffee), geddit? Thanks for that.

In trying to take a lighter as well as more frequent touch this week, I managed to bemuse, daze & confuse a handful of regular readers. Have no fear The Brew will be back to business as usual from next time. I did however find another platform for a lighter touch – Twitter. I know, I know, I’m late to the party. To be honest I don’t think I’m long for it either, so get my Twitter updates (there on the right) while they last! Do the people at Twitter expect us to stick with this for life? No! We can’t create an existential vacuum this big for long, surely?

I wasn’t even curious about Twitter until reading Rob Fitzpatrick’s write up in The Word and coming across one comment on the therapeutic benefits of emptying your mind - getting your thoughts out of your head and into the cloud. Seemed a nice break from getting my head out of the clouds! Having tried Twitter I’m at least more qualified to comment on its application now, which for commercial brands I think is limited. The brand and record company feeds are boring. But it’s a fun way for smaller more specialist communities to bond and certainly a great way for bands to engage with fans. As to the commercial model – same as usual with new digital phenomena – to be confirmed.

Which brings me briefly back to yesterday’s post on the ongoing commercial challenges for digital music in which I neglected to register my concern and sadness over the closure of Fabchannel. The live music streaming site had been built up over nearly a decade and had a catalogue of over 900 separate performances. Firmly setting its stall out as free to users and ad-funded, ultimately Fabchannel could not make that formula work, despite a heroic effort.

The audio-visual digital space is an area in which I’ve done enough work to know just how hard it is. Fabchannel couldn’t squeeze enough blood from the stone even with the added value of exclusive, live content. For yet another gut wrenching account of how a digital music start-up eventually turned to dust, read Justin Knight’s ‘leaving letter’ on the current homepage. Ring any bells? Not too dissimilar from Justin Ouellette’s closing remarks on his closure of the original Muxtape which I posted on in December last year. What with the week's other fallout, I do hope Fabchannel doesn’t become symbolic of what’s happening in the music video space generally.

Ending on a better note, this week it struck me for the first time this year how 2009 is shaping up to be another good year musically (personally I thought 2008 literally, rocked). Wednesday’s post waxed lyrical on great music from unexpected sources, in this case Starsailor’s magnificent ‘All The Plans’. And with new albums up soon from Doves, The Hours, Laura Viers (anyone any news on this?) there’s clearly never a shortage of creative genius out there however they might all eventually get paid!

Blood & stones: Squeezing value from music video

Juggernaut Brew only occasionally goes topical, but since I’m posting each day this week, it’s a good time. The much-covered, much-read, much-twittered Mexican Stand Off between music publisher PRS and You Tube can only benefit from The View from The Brew, no?

Perhaps not though - what hasn’t been been debated, analysed, rumoured & forum’d with this one already this week? Besides, it’ll all blow over in a few days and the issue will be resolved –temporarily. And that is the issue – the lack of longer-term viable commercial deals between content producers and digital distribution platforms.

The PRS-You Tube squabble isn’t trivial, it strikes at the very heart of the music industry’s commercial model and means to future sustenance. The debate over the value of music videos on the web is a pre-cursor to the future debate of music itself on the web, what with Spotify’s momentum signalling the true arrival of ad-funded streaming services.

The difference between the two of course (music video and music itself), is that music video has never had much in the way of transparent market value, ever. The term ‘promo’ is such for a reason. The original deal between the labels and MTV was as good as barter – license the content for nothing and broadcast it as a promotional platform for the on-sale of a transactional good – CDs. One business model: going, going, eventually gone.

Meanwhile, the digital revenue model is a work in progress, to be confirmed. To put it into perspective, radio pays roughly 5% of its revenues to the music industry in licensing fees – an amount considered by many on the label-side nowadays, to be too small – 5% isn’t much of a cut after all. But it’s negotiated regularly in absolute terms, informed by the amount of revenues radio makes from advertising rather than tied to it (public radio - the BBC - also strikes its own deal with publishers and labels). It’s not a big share but it is solid, stable revenue flow to the music industry.

Commercial radio is a global market worth roughly $33billion (2007) and falling. Google’s revenues meanwhile for 2007 were $17 billion and rising ($22 billion). There isn’t much doubt about which sector is now leveraging ad-revenues more effectively. While You Tube of course, is only a part of Google, it’s a significant part.

The basic argument the recording industry is taking is that Google and You Tube can afford to pay more than it does currently for what is a critical element of content. Music video may have little transparent value, but it does have considerable collective intrinsic value. Meanwhile You Tube takes the argument that its own commercial model (not that of its rich parent) must be viable in itself. And with ad-revenues currently small, it can’t afford higher rates. Now you will know all this of course. I only iterate it here to make one point – both sides are right – which is why this is a genuinely hard one.

In the straightforward negotiation, the music industry is on trickier ground than You Tube. It’s hard to make any kind of ‘claw back’ argument – that you’re increasing your rates because the world is changing, than it is to stake a claim to nothing more than a valid slice of what the new world has to offer. You can hardly increase prices based on the size of your customer if you offer the same product to other customers. The music video market is a non-exclusive glut of services now including DailyMotion, MTV and smaller players Muzu, Joost etc. Even Music Brigade e-mailed me this week to let me know that its back. Guys, I didn't notice you'd gone!

On the other hand, You Tube’s mission doesn’t square with the world of content creation. You Tube doesn’t want to discriminate between a free-to-produce UGC video and a high-end glossy music video costing £10k per-minute to produce. Offering absolutely every piece of video ever made under the same free-to-all terms basically means the eventual, certain end of high-end glossy. That’s a shame because high-end glossy, professionally produced video is what a lot of people want, but have come to expect to get for free.

Basically, the goals & missions of You Tube and those of music & content producers do not square. The only solution, from an end-product point of view, has to be some form of service tier development. If you the user want your music video for free, fine, get it in its current, down & dirty form and don’t expect to get EVERYTHING. But if you want it higher quality, with extras, tier-up to something better. That something better has to paid for, be it subscription, transactional or sponsorship funded rather than ad-funded.

The producer-distributor partnership must share equitably across both or all tiers, not just one. The onus is on You Tube (and its content partners) to develop a commercial solution that maximises revenues enough to pay its way. Offering everything ever made by anybody or any company will not cut it. Platforms: innovate around your commercial model (Spotify seems to be working hard at this, watch that space). Meanwhile producers: innovate with your content and leverage some exclusivity.

The most puzzling thing to me about this spat is the timing. It comes just as You Tube has announced the development of its 'Vevo' service with Universal. That seems to me like exactly the right way to be going, in the direction of a solution that can work on a slightly more sophisticated level than what we have currently. It shows again how labels and publishers are as separated in the vision of music’s future as either is from You Tube.

Footnote: With these types of fundamental debates, it’s informing to see what music artists are saying. Beth Orton defended her ‘little’ royalty cheques on NME. Find me an artist that doesn’t like a royalty cheque. It’s a living!

Hoist the sails, this is really good. But what direction does Starsailor set now?

Starsailor. That name doesn’t inspire let’s be honest.

But then, the name Coldplay didn’t at first, much. It hardly rolled off the tongue, but by the time Coldplay became a household name that hardly mattered. Now the word ‘Coldplay’ is part of our global language.

It might have gone the same way for Starsailor, but it didn’t turn out like that. They blasted off well enough with first album Good Souls, back in 2001, which NME called ‘an album of real musical depth’. It did very well commercially with UK sales of 550k (to date, UK Chart co.). But then the band got caught up in themselves a little bit, probably under pressure to do as well or better second time around, and the follow-up album ‘Silence Is Easy’, stuttered. Both critics and fans liked it less and it showed commercially, with 270k sales. Not bad, but still a 50% drop on the debut.

Starsailor was always far better than indie landfill, but could sail close to being bland, which didn’t endear them to a wide audience for long. Even the band’s singer James Walsh once told a festival audience that “saying you like Starsailor is never going to get you laid”. That summed up their position at that time perfectly. But by album number three things got worse, as the band found themselves firmly ‘on the outside’ as that record’s title suggested.

Actually, they were in ‘The Hole’. The Hole is something I explained (and charted) in the post on Elbow last year. It’s not a place any well meaning career band wants to find itself, because you cannot write - record or perform your way out of it. In fact, you may be creatively improving and you might get better reviews, but your audience and your sales continue to dwindle. And your label accountant doesn’t miss those. What you need is a fresh injection of belief, from both within the band and from the help. Coincidentally, Starsailor are in a hole as deep as Elbow was, with both third albums shifting just 80k units despite improved critical and fan reviews (see chart).

Eight years on from album one, re-entering the atmosphere (sorry, that’s it for the crappy galaxy metaphors) comes Starsailor again, with album four ‘All The Plans’. This is, take it from me, a very good record. Whether you can set aside your prejudice and enjoy it for what it is however, is another matter. But sometimes that’s exactly when you can enjoy music the most isn’t it? When it comes from an unexpected source and hits you right where it hurts – in your own musical preconceptions. Ooof, feel that!

It first happened to me with Duran Duran’s 'Notorious'. I hated them, but I loved it. I tried to resist, but in the end I submitted to it and was converted into a late-coming, unashamed life-long Duranie - and that feels good! It happened again more recently with Wilco’s 'A Ghost Is Born', which made me wonder how on earth I’d missed 'Yankee Hotel Foxtrot'. Somehow, when your converted to a band in this way, you warm to the artist even more than if you liked them from the off. It’s a respect thing I guess. You respect that they, the artist, has made something that has changed you.

But that isn’t exactly an insight that Virgin, Starsailor’s label, can work with I don’t think. The label now has a mixed blessing on its hands. Because the band has delivered with this richly creative, un-self-conscious, genuine, passionate record - and now it’s the label’s turn to deliver its end of the bargain.

So now what? This is a very interesting question for the label (and the band!) so let’s briefly examine the options.

Maybe, Virgin could simply prioritise the record over its other releases (something not easy to do for a band so deep in the hole). And even if it did this, what exactly does that entail? Cranking the promotion machine up to 11? Working the album for longer? Throwing more budget at it? (and convincing top management it'll be worth it). Strike option 3, this is the recession.

Is there truly something different that can be done when it comes to marketing (as opposed to promoting) a record, when you know that record is exceptional? I’m not talking about gimmicks by the way. Sure, Radiohead went & did the best marketing strategy in ages with In Rainbows. But was it really more than a gimmick writ large? It’s certainly not something that can be routinely done. Even by Radiohead’s own admission, it will be different next time.

You could always go for the covermount option, but that’s a cheap shot really isn’t it? Take the money, save a lot of money you would have needed to spend on promo, and go home knowing that 90% of a newspaper’s loyal readers will toss your plastic in the bin on the way out of the newsagents. It isn’t dignified.

You could try & synch the album tracks like crazy. I read recently that James Walsh went over to the USA and performed the new songs acoustically to music supervisors, so the band is already working that space, hard. That sounds like real work – no lazy artists here. But synch has become par for the course these days. Every label & manager worth their salt is at it, fighting for slots on the big US and UK ‘music shows’, now firmly actually television dramas.

Could Virgin have released the album via a brand partnership? All The Plans isn’t a record for brands. It’s a heartfelt thing that is meant to be universally appealing. It’s a record of simple melodies and small understated anthems. Not sure Doritos would be interested anyway even if the band was to be honest.

The label could work the album stateside, where the record has potentially broad appeal and the band less baggage. But that’s just a bigger, harder slog than grinding it out over here. We are seriously running out of options here. Just what is the answer?

Maybe we really know. I’ve started it off already, here, by telling you I love a Starsailor record! I’m going way out on a limb here this is a big risk you know! I’ve built my reputation on recommending great music to people. Real music. But All The Plans is real music.

Somehow, Virgin and Starsailor have to work as a team with this record to gain a groundswell and regain the audience the band has lost. But the band's fans have to do the selling, first by reconnecting. Could Starsailor play some intimate free gigs for the hard core fan base, performing the whole album? Perhaps on condition those invited bring along a close friend who isn’t a fan. Reach out for the to-be-converted. There’s a raft of ideas to brainstorm - “imagine, then do” as Terry McBride says. A groundswell strategy is mostly a combination of digital and live, the mainstream media slots aren't as effective these days (but the traditional slots can’t be ignored either).

The inspiration here undoubtedly, is our friends in the north and Starsailor’s own north western neighbours, Elbow. If you make a record for the people, it deserves to be heard by as many people as possible.