I’ve been retiring some services I don’t use recently. I’m out of Spotify, Last.fm, Facebook and a few others. It also occurs to me that I haven’t been using Posterous very much either. I’m going to keep this account open and I might find a use for it again at some point in the future - but for now, everything’s going on elsewhere.
My personal blog is a good starting point…
Hi,
I bought the Mark Hollis album from your website, which arrived today - and I saw the Laughing Stock vinyl at my local record store this afternoon and purchased that too.
I was so looking forward to owning them on vinyl after waiting for such a long time (especially for the Hollis solo album) and I wanted to thank you for releasing them.
However, the pressing quality is really poor. It's so disappointing. They're incredibly noisy, which is no good at all for such quiet music. Also, the first 20 seconds of the Hollis album, which is famously just quiet room ambience, has been trimmed off - obviously mistaken for unwanted silence by whoever did the vinyl cut.
It's such a shame because these are such great albums, and these slabs of vinyl should have been a real treat for the serious fan. Instead, it's just made me sad.
I thought it might have been my equipment for a moment, but I own two very good turntables and did some listening comparisons in different rooms with different records just to make sure I wasn't blaming the wrong thing. But no - these are just very poor pressings.
Don't get me wrong - I'd rather own these on vinyl than not - but what an incredible let down due to a lack of attention to detail, an absence of quality control, a rush job or just not caring very much about the music.
Surely someone inspected test pressings at some point? What were they thinking?
Not angry, just disappointed.
Andrew Dubber
Music fans, as seen by Atlantic Records
I don't think of myself as a cynical person, and I am not anti-business (though I will accept 'broadly anti-corporate'). But when your job is to analyse and critique the music industries in the digital age, it's hard not to come off as a bit negative sometimes. So when you read this, rather than imagining me cross, picture me laughing at the futility instead.
Thanks to Twitter, I stumbled upon this article in Information Week which provides an insight into the ways in which major record labels and their subsidiaries view the world of social media.
My favourite quote:
"Over time, we've become really focused on figuring out what do we do all these people we've sort of corralled?"
Corralled. Like, herded into a pen. Is that really what they think happens when somebody follows an artist on Twitter?
Snowden said he thinks of fans acquired through a Facebook page or Twitter profile as being at the beginning of the process. Ultimately, he wants to bring those people to the artist's website, get them to join a community there, and become a customer who buys CDs or digital downloads.
Because if they're in a 'community' (read: audience) then it's more like broadcasting and less like conversation, which is harder to 'monetise' (ie: sell plastic discs to). But social media, rather than being an engagement between human beings, is an important part of the marketing funnel. It's the big open end which leads inevitably toward getting people to buy CDs and iTunes downloads.
Like the road from the corral to a slaughterhouse which can only get meat out of a cow one animal at a time, I suppose...
But since the cows are all wandering around out there loose and uncontrolled at the moment, you need the right bait to lure them into the pen. And so job one is making sure artists are conversational, personal, real - and most importantly... trained to say the right things, and always on-message:
The emphasis on personal marketing also means matching social media campaigns to the style of the artist, so they publish what comes naturally to them, Snowden said. When his team first sat down to coach Rob Thomas, lead singer for Matchbox 20, he initially rejected all their selections.
And that can be hard for the poor record label, because artists aren't always easily manipulated into spouting PR rhetoric:
"We have to be careful that everything stays in their voice," he said. This presents challenges because recording artists are "imperfect marketers" and don't always understand the impact their posts will have.
But it's not enough to get your artists to collect fans on Twitter and speak to them in a well-constructed and media-trained 'authentic' voice, it's important to also trick your artists into including tracking code in their communication with fans.
Sutter said one of her challenges is that artists won't necessarily cooperate in including the tracking code she would like to see in every post. However, Snowden's team has been clever about getting artists like Bruno Mars to use smartphone apps that include that code automatically. "Bruno doesn't know it's there, but I do," she said.
Moo.
Just had an interesting conversation with a Brazilian cultural studies academic, who visited Birmingham in the mid 1990s. He said he loves Rio with its diversity of scenery, its beaches, its lush greenery, its amazing architecture and so on.
His overwhelming impression of Birmingham was of a somewhat morose industrial city, characterised by grey, oppressive buildings, very little scenery, and hardly anything that he could identify as 'inspirational' or 'vibrant' in the context of the place.
And yet, he said - "...so much creativity. So much great music, so many important people - and especially, such a high concentration of influential thought."
"How can you explain that?"
I'm going to be involved in a meet-up event in London on the 25th of October. I've been asked to canvass opinion about which of these two would be the better place to meet up and hang out with a bunch of interesting people.
Old Shoreditch StationThoughts?
