Monday, January 25, 2010 at 12:26PM | 6 Comments 
Dear UK music industry,
I do hope you enjoyed Midem. I hear it was a little rainy. Now back to the UK and back to business. I would like to introduce you to a friend of mine who inspired me to write this letter. Let's call him Ben, partly because that's his name. Now Ben is perhaps your dream customer: he lives in Clapham, London; has enough disposable income to buy CDs and gig tickets; loves and has a varied taste in music; uses the iTunes store not uTorrent. Ben is strongly opposed to the big rises we've seen over the last few years for gig tickets, especially festival tickets. Ben still buys CDs. New CDs.
On to my point. Ben will not be around forever, and there are very few Bens still around these days. One day even Ben might start sending his friends mp3s via email; watching YouTube videos rather than buying the extended DVD version of Florence & The Machine at Wembley; enjoying as much free content as he can consume and feel good about paying £200 for a gig ticket to make up for that fact.
Remember the good old days when people were excited about CDs, and paid you your full markup? No online discount retailers, no music racks on supermarket shelves. Just HMV, Our Price & Tower Records. And how long did that last? 15 years? Great times for you. 15 out of 133 years of recorded sound, and centuries of live music.
As we've always said from the start, New Music Blog is "all about the music" and if anyone has a problem with us distributing their music then they should let us know. To date we've had not one complaint. So congratulations on that front. Can I also take this opportunity to praise the likes of EMI who actively encourage publications such as NMB by sending us samples of their artists' music.
So how to sum up? To the artists, managers, labels and events organisers in the UK:
- Keep gig tickets priced highly. You have to make some money somewhere. Agreed.
- Stop trying to sell CDs. If someone wants something they can hold, sell them a T-Shirt.
- Stop developing alternatives to the mp3 just so you can bundle in "special" and "interactive" content and charge a premium for it. If a new version of the mp3 should be developed, it will be for increased sound quality only.
- Embrace the return to the roots of the "music industry" - people playing live music. Don't sulk.
To the fans:
- Consume as much new and free music as you wish. But please, go to gigs. Buy T-Shirts. Don't climb the megafence at Glastonbury or baulk at a £6 burger.
- Enjoy the death of auto-tune.
Yours sincerely,
New Music Blog
London, January 2010
Reader Comments (6)
Well said :) especially the death of autotune (and lip-synching):
before: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kvhc5yEByRs
after: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLS29AE6rqw&feature=related
when will we start paying our artists properly? and how....
Very interesting points & well made ones too Mister.Good luck with your endevours. X
Thank you for writing this! I feel the same way about the American music industry.
That all well and good, but not all music is played live, ie electronic dance based stuff and not all groups and musicians are going to make a great living from gigs. you cant just encourage people to freely steal an artists music, never buying a cd or paying for a download and think that that is sustainable. equipment is expensive and the time constraints of being an artist, producer, in a band etc are huge and even with a deep passion for their art, many artists have to give up or at least not push it as much as they could because they arent making enough money. if you take away a large part of their potential revenue stream from them, how do you think they will survive and keep striving for success. you have a hippy spirit kind of approach to it all which is fine but to get to the level where anyone would actually want to where a bands t shirt they have to make money to support themselves and put a roof over their heads. without any sales they wont be able to do it and will have to quit. ironically most of these bands that do make it have been picked up by a major or a subsid of a major and so go against the kind of free spirited approach you seem to champion. that isnt to say they didnt work their arses off to get to that stage but they and everyone else would stand a better chance of getting there with the thought that they might make SOME money through sales. in my opinion, sites like yours are great, but they should be an extra way of marketing a new record or act and proving an act to a new potential fan. offering something free in the hope that a listener will respect that artist enough to buy their material. in short, listen, make your mind up and if you really like the artist...support them and buy their cd!
Autotune isn't going away, but it will get increasingly subtle, and hidden so that you won't notice it's there anymore, except for in the most obvious pop songs. The live show will be the test of a good vocalist, like it should be (of course, live auto-tune will put paid to that) ;)
MP3s may distribute widely, and CD sales may plumment, but many artists know, there still loads of money in music. It's about getting your tracks on to television commercials! TV advertising music still makes money.