what we gotta say / power to the people / no delay

My friend Rowan (who used to be in The Dabs..their website is here, and their Love The Army EP is one of those gems that the history of New Zealand music is littered with….have I ever mentioned Peter Solomon’s single on Pagan or the self titled Obscure Desire single on the same label?) sent me, this morning, this very interesting story in an online geek magazine.

Without asking you to read through the whole thing, the essence of it is that Universal Music are planning to put their catalogue online later this year, and here is the clincher, free, supported by advertising at a site, to be launched, called oddly, SpiralFrog.

Apart from the fact that this concept, with one swoop, blasts iTunes, and, despite what the story says, hopefully, DRM, out of the water (and a whole bunch of other sites too of course), it indicates that, perhaps, just perhaps, the penny has finally dropped.

Of course it remains to be seen if the business plan that has clearly attracted both investors and UMG, has legs…..and the fact that it has attracted both is no indication it has…and there are royalty issues that will have to be worked through, not the least of which are some of the punitive clauses in contacts relating to miscellaneous income and digital returns. However, regardless of the model, those issues will have to be worked out at some stage too. I suspect the increasing move away from major labels is doing that in a de-facto way already. But I guess the idea is that free music will automatically gain a massively larger audience than the pay for stuff and that there will be simply more to go around if the increase is reflected in advertising revenues. And some income is vastly better than the potential for a nil return.

It’s a reasonably obvious model and makes so much more sense than the relentless threats to the end user that the likes of RIAA and NZ’s own RIANZ have tried and so obviously failed with. There is increasing (anecdotal and real) evidence that the lawsuits and threats of such have, rather than solve a problem, aggravated it. The music industry must be the only one in history that thinks that by treating it’s customers as potential felons, it is making a sensible step forward. You can mutter about the law and artist rights as much as you like, but when you generate that much negative energy it must come back at you eventually.

It just took someone major to make the leap away from that, and Universal seem to be the one who’ve jumped. I have to wonder too, if the timing of this has anything to do with the word Zune…

The irony for Universal though, is that, although this is a clear, and some would say, brave, attempt to preserve their future, it doesn’t make major record companies like them any more viable or necessary in the future. It does, in the way that it will greatly accelerate the digital rush and the demise of the record shop, make them less relevant than ever. Unless of course you are the likes of Mariah Carey or Bob Dylan, who couldn’t and wouldn’t want to, exist outside the systems the majors offer.

And talking of Bob Dylan, I can’t believe the garbage being spouted by critics in the rush to praise his latest.

I don’t know if it’s a good or a great record, but to listen to the critics out there, it’s the second coming….hasn’t Bob already been there for that?

All I know is that regardless of how good it is, it ain’t no Blonde on Blonde….get over it please…

the next day:

I did a search on Spiralfrog before I wrote the above and there was little else out there. In the 24 hours since, the information about it has appeared everywhere and more is known about exactly how they are going to “give” these tracks away. The concept of having to watch an ad before you get a track (WMA too) for a limited time is absolutely flawed. But, that said, what is on offer is still substantially more attractive to a kid wanting a song they’ve just heard on the radio than tu-tuing around on Limewire or paying on iTunes. People forget the 45 (or ringtone in 2006 terms) factor…that a massive amount of pop music is ultimately disposable and has no requirement beyond a week or two. I can’t help but feeling that many of the critcisms of this concept ignore this timeless driving factor, and are written from the perpective of an older customer. The post David Geffen (it was all his fault…that and Sgt Pepper) consumer who still sees the “album” or the “cd” as the core delivery unit of the industry.

But to me the real signifigance of this is the slight change in the mindset of the record company. There is and has to be a better way forward. And suing the end user is not it and won’t make the this genie jump back into the bottle.

As I’ve said elsewhere, what we are faced with now is the biggest revolution in how we listen to music since the shellac disc, 100 years ago, demolished the traditional domain of the music publisher. And record companies are notoriously conservative, they don’t like change unless they instigate it. But the nature of music and the people creating it reapeatedly throws wild cards into the mix. This is the biggest wild card of my lifetime. The future is there, and its obvious, but its about the way we get there.

But however its done, the majors will have to be forced to change, and my feeling is that the p2p sites (who are massively more relevant to this than iTunes, which is more or less an aside to this argument) and the 40 to 1 ratio of illegal to legal downloads, ie, the consumng public, are the ones driving it.

And the record companies are the followers, but follow they must…

when the heat gets so tropical / and the talk gets so topical

Just A few things that tick my box right now

• Ice cream….some years ago, whilst in London town, a few English friends offered to drag me across the north of the city, to what I was told, was without question the best ice cream I would ever have, tasted. I don’t know why I bothered. As a New Zealander I should’ve instinctively known that nothing dairy, be it ice cream, or the most expensive cheese in the UK can hold torch to even the cheapest cheddar or Tip Top found in a New Zealand corner dairy. Apart, of course from butter, the NZ variety comparing very unfavourably with those almost white and far more subtle Danish and French varieties. I was happy in my belief in our dairy supremacy until I came to Bali and discovered the multitude of places that serve, on the street, magnificent Italian gelatos and sorbets that demolish anything else I’ve found anywhere in the world, even in New Zealand’s dairies. Maybe it’s the weather, maybe it’s the something else that Bali seems to put in virtually anything, but I’ve had to resort to an extra half an hour daily at the gym to counter cravings for a half and half Tim Tam / Bitter Yoghurt & Strawberry from the little taverna on the corner of Jalan Double Six and Jalan Blue Ocean. However, waving the patriotic banner (see below) just a tad, New Zealand still has, absolutely beyond any question, the finest fish and chips on the planet. In Kawhia actually, oh and the Herne Bay Fish Ship, and Ahipara, and about 400 other wonderfully unique little shops. And the scallops……damn I miss the scallops….All this brings me to…
• Double Six Beach… about where Kuta Beach loses the Australian enforced ugliness of its better known southern strip and mutates firstly into the more graceful Pantai Legian, and thence into Pantai Seminyak, it briefly becomes the Sunday afternoon haven that is Pantai Blue Ocean, or, more commonly, after the legendary club at its northern end, Double Six Beach. After a set breakfast at Ku De Ta, a few hours on a hired lounger, under an umbrella, with the kids in the surf is the bomb. Followed of course, by an ice cream from that taverna. Decadent, hell yes, but do I bloody care…you’re just jealous. On the iPod I’ll likely this week have…
• Booka Shade – Movements…. I’ve been living with this for a month or two now, and, simply put, I love it big time. I’m sitting outside right now, as I write, in the office with the gorgeous Take A Ride slipping out of the laptop’s speakers. I love minimal German techno and I guess I have long before the twists of fashion bought it into our faces so completely in the past couple of years. There is so much understated, simple grace in a track like Body Language. There was a passage in a very funny late Victorian book, Three Men in A Boat, which described the German and French attitudes to streams (the water kind you find in forests and the like). The Frenchman will admire the beauty of the bouncing, uneven flow and enjoy its place in nature; whilst the German will think it’s offensively untidy and rebuild the sides to redirect it in a more orderly way. So it is with techno, the Germans extract beauty from the order of it, in a way that no-one else can. And it also sounds so perfect in our car, which is a new…
• Toyota Avanza…whoa, oh dear, I never thought I’d say that. You see, I’ve driven a variety of German cars for over twenty years. They build cars as they make techno; elegantly, with supreme precision and extract a beauty from that precision that no-one else can approach. The BMW three series is still the finest production car bar none and a beautifully kept late eighties 325 is a thing of much wonder. It has an atheistic that something like a Lexus can’t ever aspire too. And so it is a very strange place to be in, in mid 2006, writing with joy about a cheap faceless Japanese box, with such pleasure. But, if being in Bali has done one thing, it’s removed the material urges a little and replaced them with a new sense of reality. And that reality is also reinforced by the fact that for the past twelve months I’ve been driving the Indonesian equivalent of the Ford Model T, the ubiquitous and necessarily rugged, Toyota Kijang. As I taught myself to drive all over again, as one needs to if you are to navigate the unregulated mayhem on the roads, I understood what it was like to exist on appalling roads in a car with at best rudimentary suspension. And no bloody sound system. No bloody sound system. I endured it because it made sense to do so. But no longer. I have suspension and a reasonably good car stereo and I’m happy, happy, happy and I love the soulless little beast, although, in a perverse way now I miss the blue Kijang. My bum had become so accustomed to the way it ricocheted off every corner of a pothole, it felt like family. I hope whoever has it now, gets the same education from it I did. As an aside this is also the first time I’ve experienced the decidedly un-western feeling of selling a car for the same as I paid for it a year earlier.
• Kites….the last real drive I took DK1690XY (for that was the Kijang) on was down to the northern end of our rather beautiful Sanur Beach. Its a place I see far too rarely…is a funny thing, you move to paradise and yet sometimes you get so very complacent and let it slip right past you. But here we were, for the semi final of the annual kite completions. A defining feature of this island during the dry season are the literally hundreds of kites, from the small ones flown by local boys, to the massive, perhaps fifty metre long ones, flown by villages and banjars. These dominate our skies and they come together in July and August for a competition, the semi final of which was on our beach. There were, I was told, about 50,000 people present, but it felt like more, all gathered in community groups, complete with catering, taking turns to take their particular creation into the blue against others in their category. And there were flags and colour and banners and more flags and immense waving swathes of cloth in the wind. The Indonesians love flags….
• Flags…and they have quite a good one too. The simple red and white one is such a recognisably strong banner, and right now its everywhere. I didn’t know (and why would I) until I came here that the flag was symbolically created as a defiant gesture of independence when someone tore the blue stripe off the oppressing Dutch flag in 1945. And so it is that on the anniversary of that hard won independence, every August 17, for a couple of weeks before, this country is almost literally covered in red and white fabric. Cars, buildings, trees, businesses and just about everything that moves or doesn’t gets the patriotic sash or flag. I’m a New Zealander, and try as we might, we don’t have a massive flag bound patriotic thing going on. Our flag is a nothing for a start, But we also don’t like the exhibitionism thing that such blatant national pride demands. And yet when I hear Andrew White’s quite dramatic and very moving That Lange Track, I get a patriotic shiver, I can’t help. But that said, I have a problem with patriotism. The line between it and nationalism is too thin to make me comfortable. However, there is something about the national pride that you see here in Indonesia that works. This isn’t the ugly patriotism of the USA, a pride that has long since passed its use by date and has a rotten aura about it. This instead is a pride, like that of the US a long, long time ago, about what the nation was created from and how that creation came about. It’s a benign patriotism, and I’m enjoying the fluttering everywhere, quite a lot.

Watch out young love…

I’ve had a fair response to my last post, more than I expected, mostly from people I know fairly well and overwhelmingly in agreement with the concerns I raised therein and the question I asked myself.

One point that was, however, thrown back at me, several times, with some justification, was “but look how far we’ve come in such a short period”. And there is that of course. Except its not such a short period is it…

With advancing age, comes some ability to reflect a bit further back than those who are lucky to have a few less years on the clock (until of course, that same age causes one to forget altogether what in gods name happened yesterday let alone thirty years ago).

I still have enough functioning memory cells to talk about a time a long time ago when the New Zealand pop industry was strong, when the airwaves were full of “our” music and the stuff sold the sort of quantities we can still only dream of in 2006. Admittedly it was primarily on single but not all, and it was also primarily pop. And that’s a word that suffices for me…dress it all up in whatever niche or sub genre we like, it’s all still pop music.

The era, as distant as it is now, was the period from the early sixties through to the early seventies. There was a period before that of course when Johnny Devlin claimed to have sold hundreds of thousand of records nationwide, but his manager and label owner, my much missed old friend and mentor, the late Phil Warren, happily admitted to me before he passed away, that those figures were somewhat, shall we say, exaggerated for the press.

As only Phil, who was a truly great man in any sense of the word, could.

But the golden age that I’m remembering (and the early part of it is at best vague as I was very, very young) came a little later, heralded as much as anything by a swag of great pop tunes that touched the nerve of a young country hungry to be itself. That coupled with a state television monopoly that was happy to fill its schedule with bands and performers on variety shows and the monumental beast that was the Loxene Golden Disc. Plus radio which, when it played pop, played a lot of the big local stars. For all the fuss about the Scribe hits, the sales of How Many in all its forms are dwarfed by the big New Zealand hits of not only that era but the seventies, eighties and nineties too (there are at least twenty local records I can think of which sold three or four times as many copies).

As a kid in the late sixties I sat, doing my homework, glued to the hit parades coming out of Wellington’s studios, filled with local hits and wannabe hits, all of which were a part of our aural landscape and gobbled up by a massive and overwhelming cross-section of our populace. The acts pulled tens of thousands live, and the annual Loxene album sold in the hundreds of thousands.

And yet by 1974 it was all over. It was as if the monumental hits that were Space Waltz’s Out in the Street, and Blerta’s Dance Around the World were the swansongs for an industry. It was almost a decade until New Zealand’s pop managed to get on the airwaves again and a lot happened in that gap. There were, now, iconic records by Toy Love, Hello Sailor, Split Enz, Dragon, The Suburban Reptiles, Th’Dudes and others. None of these managed to get any airplay at all, and indeed, sold diddly squat at the time (with the exception of the fourth Enz album, driven by the crossover single I See Red, pushed onto a reluctant radio by rabid public demand).

What had happened had nothing to do with what was being produced. The seventies produced some of the strongest, and, more to the point, commercially viable music that the islands have ever produced. There was a large and healthy live scene and, later in the decade, quite a musical revolution. No, what happened was TV2 and commercially driven state and private radio. Auckland saw Radio Hauraki and the rise of 1ZM, and commercial radio and TV takes far less risk by its nature unless it’s forced to. So the music almost overnight disappeared from the airwaves. It could of course be reasonably argued that the disappearance of radio from the equation allowed the artists themselves conversely to take more risks, with the positive flow on from that leading to the likes of Split Enz, but as a result of the lack of exposure and sales, the once thriving local recording industry virtually ceased to exist by the late seventies.

And what that means to me is that any momentum and any currency NZ’s music might have right now means little in the bigger scheme. A change of government for example could (and many might say, certainly would) wipe away the airplay gains. The fragility of New Zealand music’s place in such a commercially driven environment cannot be overstated, especially with the major record companies staring so paranoiacly at the abyss. What happened thirty years ago can happen again, so damn easily.

And, as an aside, attempting to shelter it in the straightjacket that is the odd, parochial phrase “kiwi music” does us no favours either. At least give our popular form of musical expression the dignity of being called by it’s correct name.

There are no sheep on our farms

A rather respected name in the NZ music industry said to me, in the middle of a conversation the other day, about the commercial potential of a record, that sales of NZ music are in, and I quote, “complete freefall” and unlikely to improve in the near future. That, coupled with other informed comments on National Radio recently mentioning drops of some twenty percent or so this year, raises one big question. At least from where I’m sitting, several thousand miles from the action.

Namely, what in gods name happened?

Of course I’m absolutely aware of the on-going global downturn in sales of compact discs and the inevitable flattening out of digital sales.

Especially from acts represented by the major industry organisations such as the RIAA, or their equivalents.

But the percentage drop in sales, from labels represented by RIANZ (and that is a major qualifier) of NZ music, far exceeds the global trend and the word why flashes in neon rather brutally.

Two years ago the country was feting the rise of New Zealand music, and the media was full of it as was the radio. I have no idea as to breakdown of radio figures now , and the sad irony was that the music was always there, just ignored by those that happily leapt all over it when it seemed wise or convenient. It was only the work of more than a few unstinting believers over several decades coinciding with the threat of quota legislation from the Labour government that forced the sea change of the past six years or so. And what can be embraced so easily, with such little real belief, can, I imagine, be discarded just as easily.

Having been away from NZ more or less for 18 months, I have an odd, skewered, almost half baked perception of what is happening there I guess. You get little news of the gilded isles outside the country itself unless you actively search. I’m only vaguely aware of what is happening politically and socially, even with the casual, but now irregular, look at the Herald. It used to be my browser’s homepage but has since been replaced by a personalised Google news page, which is both handier and more relevant to where I am now. Much of what I do get comes from the odd look at Public Address and the stream of valuable emails I still get from the nest.

But, having been intimately involved with New Zealand indigenous music (and I mean the stuff made by or in NZ, not music of the Tangata Whenua) for close to thirty years I’m still keenly wanting to know what is or is not happening in an industry that I know, and I suppose, love, so well. It’s in my blood. Most of my information, as detailed above, comes from arch cynics, both inside and on the side lines of the industry. All of them have been or are players in recording the stuff that we like to puff our chests out about and say “this is ours!”

And so to them too, I genuinely ask, what happened. True, this week sees twelve NZ albums in the Top 40, many admittedly in the lower regions where retail bias and negligible real sales are the rule rather than the exception. But that said, they still exist in, what, until a decade ago, was a very rare place to find any NZ albums, especially independent releases.

But you look closer and note that The Black Seeds, who’ve been at number one for two weeks, is still not certified gold, and that Bic Runga’s rather highly regarded current album is only, after all this time, triple platinum whereas its predecessors had sold, at a similar distance from their release dates, three times that figure. That coupled with the relative failure (dare I say flop) of more than a few albums by hitherto major selling artists or acts with huge expectations placed on them in the past year or two, bodes ill for an industry that sits on knife thin margins for their local music in a tiny, tiny market. A market where major record companies only release local music because of a personal passion one or two people at the top of a company may hold. I hate to think how much Universal have put into their local repertoire in recent years, often with mixed results, but that they continue to do so says more I imagine about the absolute and laudable belief and vision of the MD, which goes far beyond the relentless bean counting so often required of the big four in their drive to survive, than commercial realities. Then again, having signed the only two real domestically signed international success stories of the past two decades, I guess the potential returns are more evident at that company than elsewhere.

So, to the current scenario, I’m really not putting forward answers, although I have my theories, most of which I’ve gone into before here and elsewhere. One factor though is evident. Sadly New Zealand seems to have been somewhat left behind in the digital rush. The psychology of the digital world is ingrained throughout the rest of the developed and, even, the third world, where online booths in stores (not just record stores either) and the digital culture are a long established reality. Where the CD is an increasing aside aimed at the aging consumer rather than new generations.

But not in New Zealand.

The rise of such a culture in the NZ mainstream has been, and is, stifled by the lack of access to online services; the non penetration of wireless hotspots which are a lifestyle necessity to so many; and a host of other factors. But pass NZ by, it most clearly has despite the best efforts of the likes of the wonderful Amplifier, which still remains the only real option in-country to access digital indigenous music.

There are other things I could easily mention, such as they damage the drive to fulfil radio quotas at the expense of the artist and an indigenous identity, the time wasted trying to blame blank CDs and ruminating about format shifting, and such like but I’ve been there before and see no need to repeat what I see as obvious.

I don’t for a moment think all is doom and gloom. Look at the IMNZ newsletter or the chart percentages I mentioned earlier and tell me that there is not momentum. It’s just that right now the momentum seems to have a reached a crucial place where what it is, how it is defined, and who by is being decided. And there is a thought that the place the industry was in two years ago was perhaps somewhat unrealistic and this may just be, in the scheme of things, a natural correction process.

I guess this post really was more of a question to myself, rather than a desire to look at try and analyse too much, especially as I am doing it from afar, as more of an interested observer than a day to day participant now. The next twelve months will be interesting.