Pampelmoose by Dave Allen of Gang of Four — music . media . web. culture

Ume, led by the supremely talented guitar thrasher Lauren Larson, will play this year’s MusicFestNW on September 8th. [Link to Ume listing on MFNW] If you have a wristband then do yourself a favor and check them out. They are one of the best rock bands in the country.

Mississipi Studios, Sept 8th 9PM doors at 8PM

Listen to Ume:

The Conductor
East of Hercules

Brand new track Captive on Soundcloud.

Related Ume posts: Ume live on WOXY [Link] Ume video from SXSW [Link]

When I was recently interviewed by the author Rick Moody I found myself digging back through my memories of the UK and my time during the punk rock years of 1976 through roughly 1981. It wasn’t a nostalgic exercise; the oft used colloquialism “it’s grim up North” was more of an astute observation than a simple quip. Things that came to mind during the interview exercise were the coal miners standoff against a para-military police force, the right wing government of Prime Minister Thatcher privatizing our public companies to enrich her friends in the City of London, (our Wall St,) and the overall upheaval, the convulsing of society that came with that.

So here we are again in 2011.

“The last time Britain saw widespread rioting, in the 1980s, street violence came after a long and failed political struggle against the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, which suppressed trade unions and decimated social services.” – Richard Sennet and Saskia Sassen.

History repeats itself, especially when memories are short. Here’s a paragraph from me in the aforementioned interview with Rick Moody:

It’s worth point­ing out that Gang of Four began when the Labour party was still in power under the hap­less leader James Callaghan, with Mar­garet Thatcher tak­ing the reins in 1979, eight months after the release of Enter­tain­ment! So it’s not as if we were in oppo­si­tion to the Con­ser­v­a­tive party at the time, and we cer­tainly didn’t write songs that had a polit­i­cal party agenda. We were openly sup­port­ive of the strik­ing coal min­ers, we sup­ported the Rock Against Racism move­ment, we were openly Fem­i­nist (“It’s Her Fac­tory”) and so on, but really is that any dif­fer­ent than sim­ply being coined “lib­eral” or being a left-leaning Demo­c­rat in the USA today?

Just after we released our debut album, The Clash released London Calling – The album’s subject matter was social displacement, unemployment, racial conflict and politics with a small p.

This time in London there is no Punk rock revolution swirling around the rioters providing a musical soundtrack to their nihilism. Here’s Richard Sennet and Saskia Sassen again:

“In attempting to carry out reform, the government appears incompetent; it has lost legitimacy. This has prompted some people living on Kingsland Road to become vigilantes. “We have to do things for ourselves,” a 16-year-old in Hackney told The Guardian, convinced that the authorities did not care about, or know how to protect, communities like his.

The American right today is obsessed with cutting government spending. In many ways, Mr. Cameron’s austerity program is the Tea Party’s dream come true. But Britain is now grappling with the consequences of those cuts, which have led to the neglect and exclusion of many vulnerable, disaffected young people who are acting out violently and irresponsibly — driven by rage rather than an explicit political agenda.”

And they point out that if the radical right and the Tea Party insist on attempting to fix economic problems and social ills by reducing the size of government the consequences of those decisions and actions will be enormous for the USA:

Britain’s current crisis should cause us to reflect on the fact that a smaller government can actually increase communal fear and diminish our quality of life. Is that a fate America wishes upon itself?

Are we all ok with that?

Via ApesOnTape

I spent a very pleasant summer evening at Edgefield last night watching and listening to a couple of my favorite bands – Menomena and TV On The Radio. After the show I spent some time chatting with Kyp Malone, Dave Sitek and Tunde Adebimpe. Me and Tunde (above) found ourselves discussing the vagaries of online music, especially streaming services. I’m hoping he can find the time to join my panel at the next SFMusicTech summit in September where we could take our conversation public.

TV On The Radio live at Edgefield [Link]
Menomena – Oh Pretty Remix, You’re Such a Big Remix

About Dave Allen

“Already joint favourite for the prize, I think, in all likelihood, Harvey will become the first two-time Mercury winner. Let England Shake is a masterpiece, a profound and serious meditation on mankind’s apparently endless appetite for self-destruction, filtered through the Dorset native’s complex feelings of love, pride and disappointment in her own country.” [Link]

Written On The Forehead by pjharvey

This is interesting – in 2010 82% of album sales were CDs. In 2009 the UK recorded music business drew in £928 million, of that streaming services contributed only £24 million. I wonder how much those CD sales in 2010 brought in? This article points out that “it seems nobody cares about owning music any more..” and also “anecdotal evidence shows there are even people who buy vinyl without any intention of actually playing it – to own it is enough.” And Lyor Cohen, head of Warner Music Group says “Vinyl will definitely outlast CDs because of the resonance, the sound..”

So I’m sticking to my argument that the continued decrease in music sales is due to lack of value. What say you?

This article titled “Behind the music: Should the music industry put digital first?” was written by Helienne Lindvall, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 21st July 2011 13.20 UTC

Judging by the media coverage dedicated to digital music one might think the physical format is on its last legs. In fact, even the days of downloads may be numbered as growth in the sector has slowed down considerably over the past year. It seems nobody cares about owning music any more – people are happy to access music via the cloud and stream it from services such as Spotify.

It’s as if nobody wants to talk about CDs for fear of sounding like a dinosaur. But while 90% of discussion about the music industry concerns digital consumption and how to monetise it, actual sales show the majority of music fans are, in fact, such dinosaurs. In 2010, according to the BPI, 82.2% of album sales were CDs, with downloads trailing at 17.5% (vinyl and USB sticks took up the remaining 0.3%) – despite there being fewer record stores. Revenue from streaming services is pretty insignificant. In 2009 it represented £24.5m out of £928m earned from recorded music.

This year the digital slice of the pie has grown to 25% but much of that increase is due to record labels working to move consumers towards digital. When Take That’s The Circus was first released in 2008, digital sales accounted for just 4%. Universal released an iTunes “Season Pass” for the Circus tour and found a large proportion of fans had no idea how to download music, with many asking what iTunes was. According to the label, Paul Smernicki – who was then Polydor’s director of digital and D2C – spent the following 18 months encouraging Take That fans to embrace digital, using Facebook, the band’s website to create content they could share online. For the band’s follow-up, Progress, the digital share of sales was 20%. Smernicki has since been promoted to director of digital for Universal Music UK.

At the World Copyright Summit, vice-president of the EC and commissioner for digital agenda, Neelie Kroes lamented that Europe was lagging behind the US where 50% of record company revenue in 2010 came from downloads compared to 20% in Europe . But why this obsession with converting consumers to digital? Only 40% of the UK population buys music. The majority of people hear it on the radio or in a club, but don’t feel it’s important enough to spend money on. Why not let music fans buy what they like in all formats? It may be a “chicken and the egg” scenario, but the more record stores have closed down the less people spend on music.

Jon Webster, chief executive of the Music Managers Forum, agrees. Downloads of singles have exploded, and some would argue this is because of ease of access and paying for them. Why not sell singles in newsagents, he says. Sure, there are gift vouchers for iTunes at supermarkets, but they’re impersonal and, as Universal discovered, not all people know how to use them – or even have iTunes on their computers.

Numbers to be released next week by the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) suggest a rise in vinyl sales, further proof that many people still love the physical format. The ERA analysis of Official Charts Company data shows vinyl sales are up by 55% percent in the first half of 2011. Radiohead lead the pack with more than 20,000 LP sales of The King of Limbs. In total 168,296 vinyl albums were sold in that period, making Radiohead responsible for 12% of all vinyl sales. It’s not a huge amount, but people paid an average of £16.30 per LP, compared to £7.82 for a CD and £6.80 for a digital album.

“Vinyl will definitely outlast CDs because of the resonance, the sound,” said the head of Warner Music Group, Lyor Cohen, in a recent interview with Forbes. “The quality is closest to the way the artist wants you to hear it.”

Anecdotal evidence shows there are even people who buy vinyl without any intention of actually playing it – to own it is enough. Labels such as XL Records and Universal, with their Back to Black releases, supply digital download codes with vinyl albums so people can choose to listen to the music either way. In 2010, Rough Trade teamed up with the turntable manufacturer Rega for a special-edition turntable.

“Whether it is the ‘warmer” sound many music fans appreciate, the large-scale artwork of a 12in sleeve or its sheer retro appeal, vinyl seems to be capturing the imagination of buyers despite the fact it typically costs twice as much as a CD version of the album,” says ERA director general Kim Bayley. “Much of the focus in the music industry has been on cutting prices, partly in response to the rise of internet piracy. The success of vinyl shows music buyers will pay a premium if we deliver them a package they really love.”

There may be another reason for the digital focus. “Many people are motivated by the possibility of a promotion,” says an industry insider. “I’m not sure anyone would be promoted at a label for being the vinyl guy.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

Whenever I discuss the Internet’s disruption of the recorded music business here I notice how defensive the comments become, especially from musicians and record label folk. Having gone back to read hundreds of past comments on my digital music articles during the last few days, I see that the response themes lean heavily toward the following: on one side – outrage, denial, justification of the status quo, demands that “someone” do “something” and despair, on the other it’s basically “stick a fork in it, turn it over, its done..”

Of course non of the above is helpful, as what’s actually required is a cold, hard look at the real issues (hint: it’s not “piracy”) and an honest appraisal of what works and what doesn’t work followed by a general consensus on how to actually reconfigure the recorded music business. And to keep this current everyone should calm down about Spotify being available in the USA; streaming services are part of the problem not the answer. NB: By problem I mean the decline in music sales and a reduction, or worse, in musician’s income streams.

One thing is clear – maintaining the status quo will result in disaster for musicians.

Outside of the music echo chamber all businesses have been grappling with the effects of the web, none more so than the book publishers. The parallels between books and CDs, and how consumers now go about getting them, are remarkable. The predictions from Very Serious People ( to borrow one of Paul Krugman‘s favorite phrases,) were that book publishing companies like recorded music companies would go the way of the dinosaurs. Those predictions were clearly hyperbolic as those industries will probably be around for sometime, yet what is different between the two is that the book publishers have fully embraced digital delivery of their products. Yes it took them some time but they finally wised up and started to confront their issues. And that was driven by noticing how their customers wanted to access books and magazines these days – via e-readers or simply via websites.

They may also have taken note of Clay Shirky’s maxim: “the internet is the largest group of people who care about reading and writing ever assembled in history…” We could of course switch that up to: the internet is the largest group of people who care about music and recording ever assembled in history…

I wonder if the music industry will ever push for college courses like this one?

“You never know what’s going to happen,” Carolyn Pittis, the senior vice president of global author services at HarperCollins, told a packed room of students several days into the course. “So it’s very exciting for those of us who spent many years when a lot of things didn’t happen.”

As the students scribbled in notebooks and clicked on laptops, Ms. Pittis recounted some of the biggest developments in the industry so far in 2011. The proliferation of e-readers and the growing digital market share of Barnes & Noble. Amanda Hocking, a formerly self-published author, making a book deal with a traditional publisher. J. K. Rowling’s selling her own “Harry Potter” e-books online. Even the surprise success of “Go the — to Sleep,” a hilariously vulgar children’s book parody that rose to the top of best-seller lists after being widely pirated via e-mail for months.

In the past year, e-books have skyrocketed in popularity, especially in genre fiction like romance and thrillers. For some new releases, the first week has brought more sales of electronic copies than of print copies.

A new cut from their upcoming From The Basement session..