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