Monthly Archives: September 2009

The latest Word Magazine podcast is all about record shops – the weirdos who work there, and the weirdos who shop there. At one time or another I’ve counted myself in both of these categories.

One part of the podcast discussion rang especially true for me: the 80s/90s tourist phenomenon of “I’m in London for the day, so I’ll go to Virgin/HMV on Oxford Street and try to find That CD I’ve Been After For Ages”.

I did this for years, always with a list in my head of albums (or even just songs) I would one day lay my hands on.

My ultimate example: a record by Brazilian artist Chico Buarque.

I was introduced to Buarque – a musician, novelist and playwright with a fascinating life story – by a TV documentary in about 1991. From all the tracks played during the programme one stood out: Construção, title track of a radical 1971 album which railed against the exploitation of Brazilian workers.

It became… well, not quite my life’s work to find this record, but not far off.

On trips to London I’d visit Virgin and scan their racks of World Music CDs. No dice. I did the same at HMV. No luck there either. Even my subsequent job on the Specialist counter at Virgin Sheffield (with access to every obscure music supplier known to man) didn’t help.

Now fast forward 18 years to the present day. The situation I’ve described is almost unimaginable.

I’ve long since bought Construção on iTunes. And today it’s also available on YouTube in multiple versions – ranging from the original with new imagery, to a live reinterpretation from 2006, to (my favourite) a version with translated lyrics which, while imperfect, allow me to understand the song’s poetic genius even without a working grasp of Portuguese.

Music consumption (and saturation) has truly moved through 180 degrees.

Today I have Spotify on my home PC’s desktop. A quick search has just revealed 170 Chico Buarque tracks available for me to listen to instantly, for free (albeit ad-supported). I like the idea of browsing through these, but struggle to imagine when I’ll have the chance to.

I have a year’s ad-free, cost-free subscription to Spotify’s UK competitor We7 (provided because I’d signed up for e-mail updates from Music Week and was, presumably – wrongly – considered a useful industry contact). Have I ever used it? No.

And now, just by installing Spotify’s iPhone app, I’d able to access millions of tracks spanning every genre – anytime, anywhere – for ten quid a month.  The 1992 me would have broken down and wept at the amazing opportunity this represents. And yet I hesitate to take the plunge.

Why? Not because of the financial cost (so much music for so little cash is such good value, it’s almost a joke).

I hesitate because of the cost to my one truly scarce resource. Time.

Not only would I struggle to find enough hours in the day to properly appreciate the breadth of music on offer via Spotify… but the weight of opportunity, and my inability to properly exploit it, would actually leave me feeling worse than I did when I couldn’t get hold of my musical tastes for love nor money.

This from someone who has a reasonably long commute each weekday – but one that’s now thoroughly eaten into by podcasts. Podcasts which span the whole range of professionalism (major broadcasters; independent podcasters with a range of shows; amateur individuals with single productions driven by a real passion for their subject matter; hundreds inbetween). I can reach all of them with equal ease via iTunes and XML – and that’s exactly what I do.

If you’d have told me 10 years ago that I’d experience an overabundance of music while still in my 30s, I’d never have believed you.

This will surely be a generational change. In some deep-seated way, I still think of “music” as some reasonably finite world that I should be able to hold in my head, then make listening choices from. When this is impossible or impractical (i.e. when the whole world’s recorded music output is in my pocket), I start to feel stressed: what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls “the paradox of choice“.

My kids, I suspect, think of music as an artistic equivalent of Dave Winer’s “river of news” – sit on the shores and see what comes by. Missed something? Don’t worry – if it’s important, it’ll come by again.

These are fascinating times.

Robbie Williams’ new video is now on YouTube.

Or rather, 30 seconds of his new video is. The full song’s on the site too – but only in a low quality version.

The full video’s not being “premiered” until 08:30BST on Wednesday. And, according to EMI, if you want to go to the shops and buy a copy, you will have to wait until 12 October.

That’s 37 days away.

Now, Robbie Williams is a mainstream star with continuing appeal across all age ranges (at least, EMI hopes so). And for most people above 30, the idea of a release date still retains some currency: it’s the day I can pick up the CD in Tesco or Asda along with my weekly shop.

For everyone else, release dates are effectively meaningless. The first moment someone somewhere in the world gets a digitally distributable copy of anything = its release date. It’s out there, downloadable. And that’s that – month-long pre-release campaign, or no month-long pre-release campaign.

Since we’re counting days, I calculate that the music industry has lived through 3,749 of them since the first mainstream digital music service was born.

That’s 10 years, three months and four days of corporate torpor and (more recently) panic. Recorded music sales have plummeted, and peer-to-peer copying has skyrocketed – but nothing has fundamentally changed in the way record companies operate.

I subscribe to Digital Music News. It’s a brilliantly written, even-handed daily précis of the state of the US music biz. Every day brings a new story of a forthcoming album that’s leaked across torrents worldwide, satiating demand before the labels have even attempted to do so themselves. The most recent is Jay-Z’s Blueprint 3:

The highly anticipated album slipped nearly two weeks prior to its in-store, despite tight security.  And the leak, first tipped by BigChampagne, had been feared for some time.  In fact, it was reported back in June that Jay-Z had planned on delivering the final product to Atlantic Records in London – in person – to avoid such a slip.

The issue has deeper roots within the highly-collaborative process that surrounds hip-hop production, often under the supervision of a super-producer [...] Famous producers frequently employ a coterie of beat-makers to create the final product.  Combine a connected, collaborating team with ubiquitous internet access, and leaks become almost inevitable.

In the early 90s when I worked as singles buyer for Virgin Megastore in Sheffield, a big Securicor truck used to turn up at about 8.30 every Monday morning with the new releases. In a chain, we’d hump the boxes upstairs to the stockroom.

It was then a race against time to get them all priced, security-tagged and racked out before the store opened at 9. For a major release like an Oasis or an REM, this was a major effort that meant drafting in extra staff. And heaven forbid HMV should have their stock out before us.

It wasn’t until the late 90s that the record labels were persuaded to deliver the damn things on a Friday instead, so we’d at least have Saturday to process them. This was the result of a gentleman’s agreement between the retailers and the labels that we wouldn’t break the embargo and sell anything early. With very few exceptions, this agreement was respected – primarily because the labels could monitor what was sold via chart return information, and threaten to withhold future stock from anyone who broke ranks.

As I type this little scenario from memory, I can’t quite believe it was all so recent. From the viewpoint of the recorded music world today, it feels like the stone age.

But all the evidence suggests the music industry still has its head in that era.

The peerless Look Around You team, as always, have it exactly right (below).