Hugely recommended, this interview with Martin Mills, owner of the most important independent record label in the world (and the bloke who released some of my favourite records ever and still does):

The internet has revived interest in music, thinks Mills, by encouraging people to experiment.

“It’s made so much more possible – a greater and deeper love of music. It’s re-stimulated my own involvement in music generally, rather than just my business. The links people send you allow you to go off down a path and discover something great.

“People who in their 30s a few years ago who may have stopped listening to new music, or were listening to iterations of music they heard in their late teens or early twenties, are now able to discover entirely new things. You’ve got new artists being discovered by 30, 40, 50 and 60 year olds. You’ll now have a group of friends talking about music and sending links. I think that comes from the integration of the laptop into both our working and our personal lives, the internet is so great at spreading the word.”

[From Indie music mogul: The net's great for us • The Register]

There were two great scams in the 2000s (assuming the decade is over – it’s technically not of course).

One, it almost goes without saying, was the drive to war scam pulled fairly successfully by the Bush administration in concert with a few compliant governments (the UK and Australia come to mind) whereupon clear and known fraudulent data was placed in front of not only the public as a whole, but whole layers of elected officials and lawmakers across the US and the UK. It was the WMD scam and arguments continue as to whether it cost the lives of 100,000 or a up to million Iraqis (as if the lower figure is somehow better) and the wholesale dispossession for millions more. From a US perspective, I guess it was hugely successful.

The second, whilst it existed on another, less deadly, level altogether, was no less successful, and involved the large media companies, many smaller media companies and assorted copyright administration bodies. This we will call the Piracy Scam.

Why am I revisiting this now? Well the piece briefly excerpted below pissed me off:

How to help prop up the ailing music industry? Tax Google, suggests a new report commissioned by the French government.

I’m close to speechless at the stupidity of this.

It will make no difference. None at all. Nothing will boost the revenues of the wholesale industries beyond a complete 180 on the part of the customer back to the buying habits they, in increasing numbers, left behind during this last decade. One has to remember that the folks making these rules, and the ones crying foul over the alleged lost revenues are either people in their mid-40s onwards, who if they buy music, were educated to buy it in album format, in the decades since the recording industry invented the format in the late 1940s, or they simply don’t buy music.

And they’ve been told that revenues are down (true) because people are simply stealing the music online (extremely arguable).

Are people taking music in large quantities online? Yes, of course they are, there is no doubt of it. Is this causing the crash in revenues? I’d argue yes, in small part, but that’s all.

And that’s aside from the glaring and oft stated fact that a downloaded tune does not equal a lost sale, despite the rampantly loony figures the IFPI happily touts (and are gobbled up by the media).

The primary reason revenues are down is because the primary target for recorded music are people under 25. And they no longer buy albums. Mostly they don’t even know what they are. They buy MP3s – the new singles. They don’t want albums. They want tracks. And the evidence to support this is voluminous. Last year in the United States there were 1.16 billion (yep, billion) digital tracks sold. That is the equivalent of 1.16 billion singles purchased, because that’s what the MP3 is, a single: a 45, in the old language. Add to that just under 400 million albums (of which some 3.2 million were actually 14 album box sets by The Beatles, so add another 40m or so to that figure!) and you have a very, very large number of units purchased by customers in 2009 – far higher, in fact, than at any time since Soundscan began recording accurate figures in 1991.

Throw into that mix two other factors, firstly that the digital figure removes the cost of manufacturing, distribution and warehousing, and secondly the huge drop in recording costs over the past decade as digital became the norm, and a rather different picture emerges.

One more figure to toss into the mix: the decade long rise in performance income received by performing rights organisations as many different income streams, driven by technology, plus the massive advances in collection techniques and the sad story that both the media and the lawmakers happily trumpet without question, looks increasingly shaky. The Times did an analysis using a few, but not all, of these factors a month or two back which was interesting.

The truth is that in 2009 there was a massive jump in income from music worldwide:

Thanks to new collecting bodies, more music users buying licences, and a big rise in US revenues, global performance rights payments increased by 16% to $1.5bn (£940,000) in 2008, according to industry newsletter Music & Copyright.

Performance rights revenues come from the public playing of music across various locations and platforms, from radio stations and nightclubs to supermarkets and hair salons.

Such income has become more important in recent years as music sales have fallen. The UK is the largest territory in terms of performance rights distributions and total payments rose 11.5% to $220m (£138m) in 2008, according to Music & Copyright. It compiled its global figures through data from collecting societies worldwide, including PPL in the UK. The most played song was Mercy by Duffy.

The largest increase was in the US, with payments surging by 176% to $100m (£62.7m) as digital and internet radio services were licensed.

Mix all that together and toss in the now accepted monstrous myth that musicians are now unable to survive off their royalties (performance is up, and less than 1% of all acts likely survived from master copyright royalties, due to the inequities in the way the recording industry handles recoupment, despite what Bono and Lily Allen would have you believe) and have to struggle. They’ve always struggled.

So, yes, as we roll into three strikes legislation the world over, and labels moan poverty because the playing field and the rules have changed, a little sanity would perhaps be appropriate as we reflect on how well the Piracy Scam, has been sold, as I repeatedly hear people that should know better commenting on the Facebook generation that won’t, so they say, pay for music. That steals and destroys the livelihoods of those that make the music.

It’s bullshit.

And it didn’t even take a speech from Colin Powell.

Yeah, its via Bob Lefsetz, who mostly loves the sound of his own voice (remind me..what has he actually done apart from type?), but this, if you wanna be a pop star or just make music professionally, is very, very good:

record labels. they can help or they can drag you down. here’s the scoop. if they expect you to be the primary distributor of the product, don’t sign the deal. the typical deal is a 90/10 split, you get the ten minus every expense related to the project. thus you are paying for everything and giving the label 90 percent of the gross. read that sentence again.

if they aren’t really really offering you something good in terms of promotion, or something….some tangible quantitized tie-in to something bigger, skip it. you can hire that stuff yourself easier. talk to other artists on the roster and ask them what they think. any more, if you are an emerging artist, it’s going to be hard to find a label home. they are losing so much dough they only want for sure money makers or somewhat less money losers on the roster, and they are dropping folks right and left. this is all good for you. take heart. it’s a 90/10 deal and you get the 10 and they want you to be the primary distributor of the product plus pay for the whole deal, those are not very good terms.

Lots & lots more at the link.

If there was another reason needed not to sign a record deal with a major in 2007, this may be it:

The music video is shrinking. With the music industry in crisis from falling sales and file sharing, labels have less cash to subsidize elaborate videos that will mostly be seen in miniature on computers. The result has been a major shift in the art form, as artists increasingly embrace the YouTube aesthetic with cheap, stripped-down, low-production videos.

Even your uber-budget pop star fantasies, assuming you have such things, are unlikely to be fulfilled anymore…and that was, lets be real, the only thing a major could offer anymore….

They are a phenomena of our times I guess, compilations I mean. Well, not compilations per se but intelligent compilations. There have, of course, always been compilations…well since the early seventies when they were first visited en mass as a marketing concept.

In New Zealand we were plagued with dozens of Solid Gold Hits and Platinum Plus type collections and the normal K Tel nonsense. These generally had the tracks “abridged” by some record company twerp in the studio “in the interests of giving you as much music as possible”. They were, relentlessly, complete shit – badly mastered and pressed on the cheapest vinyl with appallingly designed and realised sleeves. They were without exception, complete crap without any vestige of virtue beyond increasing the members of RIANZ (the old boys club that serves the interests of the record companies) annual turnover, not that there is anything wrong with that, that’s their job for gods sake….it often bemuses me how record companies come under so much criticism for doing exactly what they are intended to do.

The irony of all those compilations is that they have now become vaguely collectable and cool, which just goes to show that one generations complete crap becomes the next ones gold. Odd….

Of course there were the odd great collections but they were few and far between, so much so, that they often exerted an influence beyond their few tracks. I’m thinking of the Motown Chafrtbusters Series, or the very cool Hard Up Heroes collection of obscure Decca beat groups that I thrashed daily for god knows how long.

Punk and the rise of the indie label changed it all somewhat but these tended to reflect contemporary music and were not intelligent, annotated thematic compilations of the sort I’m talking about now.

The last few years have seen so many fantastic compilations, it really is very hard to keep up. Sometimes, for me, I already own half the bloody thing but the theme works so well, or the liner notes are so damned readable, or the there is a track or two I need beyond rationale, that I have to own it.

I find myself playing and exploring these quite a lot. I tend to ignore the ones where they are a) mixed, as I want the tracks, the songs without something bumping over the top when I least want it; or, b) full of re-edits by the compiler. Dave Lee and Dimitri are especially bad at this, providing pointless ego-driven re-edits of some classic that didn’t need it. That said, when Dave Lee gets it right, he really does. I’m currently thrashing the Destination: Boogie collection on his Z label, a bunch of fairly obscure, to me at least, and I was buying and listening to a fair amount of black music of this ilk around that period, and this really takes me back to those dirty London clubs I was hanging out in around then.

Co-complied, and wonderfully annotated by the ever dependable Sean P (and I wonder just how much of these albums Sean actually does and Joey puts his name to, to sell records y’know…), I love this early-to-mid eighties electro funk period. It’s come into its own again in recent years but I’ve never stopped listening. Check the rather fantastic Long Enough from some variation of The Last Poets or Colors’ Am I Gonna Be The One, pure throbbing electro-bass synth bliss, complete with the obligatory me-or-her talking bit. My only real complaint is the lack of production, songwriting or licensing credits (which may have something to do with the lack of, ummm, licensing, on this album)…if you are going to release a collection for the trainspotters, you have to give it all to us…

Souljazz are the kings at this sort of thing and I tend to buy many of their collections simply because they are so damn good. There have been a couple of duds (I think the Studio One thing is being dragged out a little, but only now) but, mostly they hit the proverbial nail. I love the second New York Noise album more than the first, which had a few too many tunes I knew too well, but this sort of fucked up, drug phased raw, often simply wrong, funk is timeless. Their prototype hip hop collection, Big Apple Rappin’, is a loveable and timely replacement for my much played vinyl collection, Back to The Old School (complied by Dave Lee many years back for his Republic label) but the two, while they cross over, really are going to complement each other. I love rough, passion driven, under-produced noise and this is just that, pushed along by the grime on the street as much as anything. Wicked….

And I’m gagging for the forthcoming Tom Moulton comp. In a similar vein, Salsoul’s Mixed With Love, their collection of mixes from the legendary and crazy Walter Gibbons is both captivating and frustrating. Captivating in that the first 2 CDs show one of the greatest master craftsmen of his era at the height of his powers, his rework of Loleatta Holloway’s Hit’n’Run still, after all these decades, causes me to shiver in awe just a little; and frustrating because, firstly, most of CD 3 is pretty awful and that is sad, as his eccentricity overwhelmed his music, but, secondly, and even more so, because CD 3 did not need to be so decidedly average. What the world really needed was a cross label anthology so we would get the likes of the percussive and very special (as in, you’ve never heard so much space in a disco record) I’ve Been Searching by Arts and Crafts, or the mind-blowing Treehouse / School Bell, a remix of an Arthur Russell journey, or the two versions of Set It Off on Gibbon’s own Jus Born label.

So with that in mind, maybe someone will do cross label compilations of Larry Levan, or eighties Francois K, Shep Pettibone, Jellybean or Arthur Baker (before the coke kicked in and he started doing Bruce Springsteen mixes etc, for the cash). They’d sell at least one of each to me….

Oh, and I also like the Arctic Monkey’s album a lot…does that make me a fashion victim….

I have, happily, refrained from commenting on the recent Sony BMG spyware mess for a couple of fairly good reasons. Firstly others have done a much better job than I could hope to and I’m happy just to sit back and follow the story and the way it evolves. I love the comments from my friend Simon and think he nailed it pretty much. All this fuss really is simply a blip on the radar that warns of the impending storm…the real crime here is in the list of albums affected. Ok, the Dion album is excluded but simply releasing the rest is a crime against good taste. This brings me to the second part of why I haven’t bothered commenting until now.

I think I’ve used the term “suicide note” before but this sort of desperation really reeks of a scorched earth policy..if we can’t will then we are going to take the whole thing down with us. The record industry talks of doom, of downloading, of burning, of anything that pushes the blame away from their doors for the collapse in sales in recent times. But just look at that list, what a bloated ugly bunch of records they really are. In a craven desperate run for profits they forget, as always the reason they exist…the song and the passion that song brings out in a human being. We all feel it. I’m not afraid to die but I’m scared to death of never being able to hear music again.

The glory days of the eighties, widely seen in the industry as a golden age, a time when record sales rocketed worldwide, but especially in the USA, which drives the global music industry were largely a result of two things. A quick look at the US charts of 1980 or so is a pretty depressing thing. Bloated, turgid, for want of a better word, shit, like Kansas, Journey, Van Halen, REO Speedwagon dominates the album charts and the only memorable things on the singles chart are black.

Pretty scary stuff and not an industry showing signs of a healthy future but by the mid eighties that all changed. The most obvious thing that saved their bacon was the CD. But the other thing, which revolutionised everything was British pop, the stuff that raised its head in the aftermath of punk, the Culture Clubs, the Whams, the ABCs etc which in an odd way represent as much as anything the true legacy of Malcolm McLaren and John Lydon (Johnny, Johnny…..you released half a dozen of the greatest singles of all time and one of the finest albums ever then ended up parodying yourself in 1996 with that sad Pistols reunion..to quote Blake Baxter, What the fuck happened?). MTV and British pop came crashing together and the rest, as they say…. If you don’t think Van Halen’s Jump isn’t that band trying their damnedest to sound like Flock of Seagulls then you are wrong.

And it’s the failure of the record industry to embrace the song again, especially in the rock’n’roll world, which is killing them. The MP3 is the 7” single and just as disposable, and so it should be. Download, burn and delete…it’s not destroying record sales, it’s the only thing keeping them alive. The number of blank cds sold is no indication that burning is destroying the industry as these are ultimately disposable items (I’m more worried about the landfill problem). The assumption that every song downloaded or burnt is a lost sale is so obviously flawed I won’t even go there. As soon as the industry embraces the technology, encourages the future, then they might have one….once the industry gets its head around the passion that this piracy indicates again then it can move forward.

The other thing which Simon goes into in his blog which I’m gonna touch on briefly is this whole Fallujah WP thing. What really gets me is the fucking stupidity and arrogance. If you really need to see how arrogant these pricks are check out Cheney today. From the most corrupt dishonest American politician since Nixon, this really is rich, paraphrased as: “we lied and fucked your country and I became a lot richer in the process as did many of my friends so now its time to roll over and take some more”.

It’s not about the Democrats and the Republicans for god’s sake. The Democrats have blood on their hands too. It’s about those poor begotten people in Iraq who have had their country ruined, their lives taken, their world turned upside down to suit the grand purposes of the US government and their generally compliant populace. Despite all the bullshit about freedom, tyranny, democracy and all the other Kentucky Fried Clichés, the place is immeasurably worse off than it was three years ago. Saddam’s tyranny is replaced by another (oh…you only tortured seven…that’s ok then), Chalabi, Cheney’s buddy and just as odious, looks likely to return; death is random everyday as terror organisations, which were given a happy breeding ground to replace Afghanistan, kill with regular impunity; towns are destroyed from the air, just like Saddam with chemical weapons of questionable legality (and its got nothing to do with the letter of the law legality you idiots, you are the liberators, remember, this is the very thing you claimed you wanted to liberate Iraq from…) . Its about our world and how the United States has fucked it…Democrats and Republicans. So, forgive me if I sneer at your blame game….

Oh and Link Wray died…sad.

I need to mention some songs that hit a nerve today………

Ok….Sonny & Cher-Just You….Sonny hung around with Spector and learnt a lot. This one, from about 65 is pure homage and glorious it is too. Sonny might’ve died coked up as he skied into a tree and Cher might be a bit sad around the edges (although I like her and she’s made a good record or two), but check out the bit about 30 second in when Sonny drops in…whooo…which leads to The Ramones-Danny Says…off the much underrated End of The Century. I know Spector’s a nutter and he probably killed that poor girl but what I wouldn’t have done to have heard a Spector produced Joey Ramone solo album…Independent Movement-Slipping Away…a tip to Bill Brewster for this one. From 1976, one of those, is it funk, is it disco records that evolved in to the boogie sound off the early eighties. I played it five times yesterday….fits nicely with Lee Douglas-Same Changes…on Rong, very Levanish, bubbly, funky, glistening, …all the clichés but I like it. Roxanne Shante-Have a Nice Day….Marley Marl on the board and pure genius. She’s an academic now I believe but she made at least half a dozen killer singles in her day…Kerri Chandler-Six Pianos… lush, very late eighties Detroit, with more than a touch of the likes of Mathew Jonson. One of those records…well, well one of those records that leave me a little speechless. I really like Happiness by another old trooper, Ron Trent (who has made more than a few dull noodlefests in recent years) and Quentin Harris. Nothing special, just pleasant old school vocal house but it works. Finally Patti & The Lovelites’ oddly named Love Bandit on Cotillion from the mid seventies, very Barbara Mason. There seems to be an endless supply of these one off gems…check this….click

To quote Julie Andrews (and why not, when I was growing up, she was seen by the world at large as the epitome of all things good and decent, that is, until she took her top off in some piece of fluff some years later and willingly destroyed that pre-conception…but then again, those of us who knew where the dirty words were in “TSOM” were never fooled anyway)..lets start at the very beginning…

A few weeks back I opened the post to a promo copy of the new Kraftwerk live album “Minimum-Maximum”. These things sometimes turn up in the mail sometimes, courtesy of a promo person somewhere and obviously I’m not one to look a gift horse in the….I’m pretty grateful. Especially since its Kraftwerk and I’m a fan and a bit of completist. But, that aside, I love and need new music and it helps to satiate a craving. The album had a tracklisting and not much more on the sleeve, but it did the trick. You would imagine that the King Klang crew would sound petty much the same live or studio. But the live versions added a completely new raw spirit to the, perhaps, overly familiar soundscapes that are “Trans Europe Express”, “Autobahn” and the rest and, with a ton of paperwork to do in May, it became the late night, rather loud, soundtrack to several GST returns and a lot of writing before I left the country.

As the album was due for release early June, I passed on the promo copy to a mate before I left NZ and, like a dutiful consumer, picked up a “proper” EMI release from the HMV in Singapore’s Orchard Rd. It came, complete, with the, now standard, EMI suicide note (the copy protection warning) on the back sleeve. But I ignored it…generally it causes no problem, although I’ve noticed more and more that EMI discs are a bit hit and miss on car players, which can be a bugger.

But can I get the thing to play on the laptop (which is a primary audio source right now)… nope. It simply refuses to recognise the disc as an audio CD and keep on asking me if I’d like it formatted. I’m sure there is way around, and I know this has gone through the courts before, but it’s not affected me to date (apart from some David Bowie album trying to install a player without asking…an EMI Trojan…actually I’d forgotten about that until this minute) and I really can’t see why, having bought a legitimate delivery device for audio, I should have to jump hoops to use the bloody thing. The record companies’ wonder why the consumer is pissed off….it’s not rocket science.

So….I downloaded the damn thing. It wasn’t hard to find a decent copy on a peer to peer site and down it came, courtesy of the free very high speed hotel broadband. And, more to the point, as a music consumer (read “addict”) I shall never buy another EMI CD “Copy Protected”, or any other “protected” at any time in the future. Why should I? They are not fit for the purpose they’re being sold for. Yep, I know there is a warning on the back but it’s rather beside the point to expect consumers to read small print (which in my case was covered by a price sticker anyway) when only an idiot assumes that laptops are not, in 2005, a primary playing device for compact discs. Quite frankly, while a company like EMI operates with such blatant disregard for its customer, they deserve to die.

The other disc I bought at the same time, Common’s “Be” (the Kanye West album when there isn’t a new Kanye West album…dunno if it’s quite the album 2002’s “Electric Circus” is, then again, few albums are, but I’m playing it to death, especially “The Food” and “They Say”) plays perfectly. And two other people I know have bought it after hearing it via me…the free live DVD helps. Unlike EMI, who have broken retail rule number one…don’t put barriers in the way of selling…Universal have added an incentive which cost them little.

On a similar note the editorial in Monday’s International Herald Tribune was of some interest. I read it as I was sitting on a Singapore Airlines flight with, I would guess, over a hundred, mostly blockbuster, albums available on the inflight system, none of which interested me in the slightest, but I’d hazard I’m not general target. Facing The Music came out on the occasion of US music retail’s “Big Tuesday” last week, with new releases from The Black Eyed Peas, Coldplay and The White Stripes all big acts with massive sales potential and a huge potential upside for traditional retail, being banged out at the same time. Figures for 2005 predictably show an ongoing slide in sales….down 7% this year on last. It muses about the depression after the flop of the Warner Music IPO and the ongoing tendency of the majors on blame their woes, wrongly, on digital piracy, rather than looking a little closer to home. At the blockbuster mentality that can be traced back to the mid to late 70’s in the US (and ironically a mentality that Warner Music, and the likes of David Geffen and the other moguls who dominated the US industry over the past 20 years helped invent with the likes of The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac and the other bloated “Big” acts who mattered more than the lesser signings) that has eventually eaten away at the industry.

But as the piece correctly says:

These days there are more musicians and bands than there have ever been. And there are plenty of music buying fans. Together they are discovering alternative means of connecting with each other.

But to me, musing away over here in South East Asia, the revolution that we are seeing right here, right now (good name for a song that…) goes back to about 1976, to the beginnings of the rise of the post punk indie labels, specifically in the UK…labels like Stiff, Chiswick, and more precisely the slightly more anarchic Rough Trade and Factory. Sure, there have always been independent labels, but pre-punk these were, more or less, little labels that wanted to be majors…in the way that a company like Mercury or Capitol came out of the forties aspiring to be RCA, or A&M and Island wanted to be Capitol in the sixties. But the punk thing was different. It was about taking control away from these people, handing it back to those who created (whether it be the musicians or the producers or the smart business whiz who often is just as much a part of the creative process as the guy who writes the song). Andrew Oldham’s Immediate was a prototype as was Lieber & Stoller’s label, Red Bird. But punk, and later electronic music, meant that, for the first time the musical ethos matched the label ethos. And it took the digital revolution to bring this ethic to full fruition…to bring us to where we are now, where the business model that popular music has survived on since about 1920 has largely been superseded. And no number of blockbusters will change than……

It 1976 has any legacy, I guess this may be it….

Hey, and talking of the rise of indie music…Scribe’s “Crusader” is, after a year or so, top twenty in the Australian album charts which is pretty damn impressive. I’d love to see it trickle around the world, country by country in the way that an indie record like this potentially can