Where Worlds Collide

Sometimes I wonder if there are people out there who really believe there are no ways to find new music apart from either listening to Radio One or surfing MySpace completely at random. Just read this commenter in a thread about the failure (so far) of digital music products.

I know this sounds trite but it would really help if the big music companies did their job as “gatekeepers” and keep the mediocre music away from the masses. What ever happened to quality A&R departments? With the proliferation of cheap music sequencing programs, horrible club DJs and radio that is beyond unbearable, quality control is more important than ever!

It’s actually worse that that, Big Music is actively keeping far better music away from the masses. They’re pretty much only interested in the lowest common denominator music that follows a small number of proven formulas that they know how to market. And with more and more discerning music fans having made their excuses and left the mainstream, Big Music is increasingly left with the people who can’t or won’t seek out new music for themselves.

I personally think the gatekeeper/elite tastemaker model is fundamentally broken anyway and deserves to die. For better or worse, the Internet has fragmented the market, allowing artists in niche genres to market their music directly, bypassing that small and corrupt clique of gatekeepers and tastemakers.

Such artists rely on fan-to-fan recommendations to build an audience rather than on Big Music’s shock-and-awe advertising campaigns. Perhaps the role of new digital music startups ought to be to encourage that sort of thing, rather than prop up the dying major label business model? The thing about independent artists in niche genres is their business model depends not so much of gaining the largest possible audience, rather on minimising the number of middlemen between them and their audience. Digital startups are new middlemen, they’re only of any use to artists if the value they add is more than the cut they take. And they’re only any use to music fans if they act as a sort of smart filter, perhaps using some kind of wisdom-of-crowds approach to filter out the stuff that falls below the Sturgeon threshold.

Don’t expect the major labels to support such a thing - While they claim to speak for up-and-coming artists, the reality has always been that they’ll do their damnedest to marginalise every new artist except for the small minority that they choose to sign.

The latest issue of Classic Rock Presents Prog came out today, containing the results of 2010 readers poll, in which I remembered to vote this time!

It’s great so see so many of the bands I’ve travelled around the country to see feature a lot in the results. Both Mostly Autumn and The Reasoning did well, with MA’s “Go Well Diamond Heart” and The Reasoning’s “Adverse Camber at #3 and #5 in Best Album. The Reasoning also made #4 in Best Band, and Mostly Autumn’s “The Night In Leamington” at #5 in Best DVD, the latter very creditable when you consider the other four were Rush, Transatlantic, Porcupine Tree and Opeth, all bands of far higher profile

Not only that, Anne-Marie Helder, Kim Servior and Olivia Sparnenn took the top three positions in Best Female Vocalist. Not only lovely people, but three are great singers who have paid their dues slogging around what’s euphemistically knows as “the toilet circuit” for several years, and it’s certainly time to see them start to get the recognition they deserve. They’re all real singers who don’t need auto-tune and can very definitely cut it live, which is more than can be said for far too many of today’s chart-toppers. Forget X-Factor, it’s the Prog Factor that really counts.

And we shouldn’t underestimate the significance either. Classic Rock Presents Prog is not a subscription-only niche publication with a limited audience, it’s a widely-available newsstand publication with a readership of more than half that of the NME.

The other big prog news this week is the announcement of the several of the bands who will the playing the Classic Rock Presents Prog stage at High Voltage in July. Jethro Tull will be one of the headliners, with Mostly Autumn, Spock’s Beard, The Enid, Caravan and Pallas also on the bill. This is looking like a fantastic weekend already.

Cambridge Rock Festival 2009, with Mostly Autumn’s Bryan Josh on guitar

A sad announcement today is that York progressive rock band Breathing Space are calling it a day. As said on their official website:

After a lot of thought and deliberation, we are sorry to announce that Breathing Space has decided to disband.

We would like to thank everyone that has supported us over the last few years. It has been an exciting and wonderful journey and we have all enjoyed every moment. Whereas I am very sad that this project has come to an end, as one door closes another door opens, so watch this space…

All the best,
Iain Jennings

Iain Jennings, The Riga, Southend, March 2010

For those of you who aren’t regular readers of this blog, Breathing Space are the band Mostly Autumn keyboardist Iain Jennings and vocalist Olivia Sparnenn put together to promote Iain’s 2005 solo album “Breathing Space”. After Iain left Mostly Autumn at the beginning of 2006, the project took on a life of it’s own and became a band in it’s own right. Like many bands at their level, they’ve been though a number of lineup changes over the years. Barry Cassells replaced original drummer, Iain’s brother Andy in 2007. There was the departure of guitarist Mark Rowen in 2009, and most significantly of all the departure of Olivia Sparnenn in 2010 to take up a new role as lead singer for Mostly Autumn. The final incarnation of the band featured Heidi Widdop on vocals, and Adam Dawson on guitar.

Olivia Sparnenn, 2009 Cambridge Rock Festival

I first became of fan of the band after I met Olivia after a Mostly Autumn gig in February 2007, and she personally invited me to their gig at The Roman Baths in York the following weekend. At the time the band were without a permanent drummer, and Olivia’s father Howard was standing in; I remember him remarking to me that he didn’t want to occupy the drumstool on a permanent basis, since he thought having her dad on drums would rather cramp her style. That gig was plagued with severe technical gremlins, but I could see the potential there, and I thought Olivia Sparnenn was a real star in the making, A month later I saw them play a superb set at the Mostly Autumn fan convention in Ringwood, Hampshire, and said to bassist Paul Teasdale that give them a couple of years they’d be giving Mostly Autumn a run for their money. And I think I was right.

Paul Teasdale, The Riga, Southend, March 2010

Over the course of the following four years the band recorded two excellent studio albums, “Coming Up for Air” and “Below the Radar”, and played a great many memorable gigs. Among those that stick in the mind are the very emotional performance in Mansfield in May 2008, the stunning show at the Cambridge Rock Festival in 2009, and what appeared at the time to be a spectacular rebirth of the band with a brand new lineup at the same festival in 2010. Over the years their sound evolved, from the dominance of big soaring ballads and jazz-rock workouts in the Mark Rowen era, to the tougher hard rock orientated approach they took over the last couple of years. Even after Olivia left the band they managed to reinvent themselves once more with new singer Heidi Widdop, and things looked set for another chapter in the story.

Mark Rowen, 2008 Cambridge Rock Festival

In terms of the number of their gigs I’ve attended, Breathing Space are second only to Mostly Autumn. I’ve likened being a fan of a band at this level to being an away supporter of a lower-division football team. It involves travelling to towns like Crewe, Mansfield or Southend, often staying in dodgy B&Bs when it’s not possible to arrange lifts home. But there’s a great camaraderie amongst fellow fans, many of whom have become friends, as have some of the band. It’s quite different from being a fan of someone like Oasis. Part of being a loyal fan is you stick with them through the bad times as well as the good. Yes, there were times when a cloth-eared house soundman from a toilet of a venue rendered their finely-crafted music all but unlistenable to a sparse crowd. But there were times when they delivered mesmerising performances to appreciative audiences, or went down a storm at festivals. Sadly they were a band who I always felt deserved far more success than they ever achieved; they were worth far more than playing for sixty people in working-mens clubs in the East Midlands.

Heidi Widdop at the 2010 Cambridge Rock Festival

At the time of writing, nobody from the band has given any specific reason for the split, and since I know some of the band personally I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to speculate about it on a public forum. So here’s to the past four years. Let’s remember the good times, and I hope to see all the band involved in exciting new projects over the coming months and years. There may not be any more chapters in the Breathing Space story, but I hope for and expect at a sequel.

Music streaming and downloading site mFlow has been having a January sale. For a few days, they reduced the price of all downloads to 20p a song, or 20p x the number of songs for the whole album. It’s resulted in something of a feeding frenzy; I think I bought ten albums altogether; and judging by the steady stream of credit notification emails I’ve been getting, many others have been doing the same thing. 20p for a song or two or three quid for an album is well within impulse-buying territory in a way a £7.99 album is not.

My purchases included a couple of lesser back-catalogue albums I’ve only got on vinyl from Rainbow and Blue Öyster Cult, a few albums I’d passed on when they came out, such as a couple of recent Marillion live albums, and “After” by Scandinavian metal artist Ihsahn, which I decided to check out since it had appeared in several people’s end-of-year lists. I flowed on track from that with the words “This album is so awesome I feel guilty for paying only £1.60 for it”, and promptly got three 20% commissions for further sales!

Since I’ve seen both The Reasoning and Mostly Autumn coming up in my credit notification emails, I do wonder how artists feel about their work being sold for such low prices - I do remember one RPG writer I won’t name being not at all impressed to find one of his works in the remaindered bin at Stabcon a few years back. But surely any revenue is better than none, and gets there music heard by people who might not otherwise have listened. From such beginnings, fandom can start, if the music is awesome enough.

It does make we wonder what the rational price for MP3 downloads ought to be nowadays. This year I’ve paid everything from that £1.60 for the download of the Ihsahn album, to well over double the price of a regular CD for the pre-order special edition of “Go Well Diamond Heart” by Mostly Autumn, and I really can’t say that either was not a “fair” price. In one case I was taking a gamble on a completely unheard-of band, with only Dom Lawson’s word for whether it was any good, and the other was a fan pre-order for an album which would not have been possible to record otherwise.

Time will tell what sort of pricing strategy labels and artists will take in the future. It may well be that with universal “always on” internet connections we’ll all move towards streaming anyway. But I think the days of pricing album downloads so as not to undermine CD sales are almost certainly numbered.

What does anyone else think?