Big gaps in blogs

It seems that I've ignored this for a while. It just doesn't feel very important - my company has been pitching for loads of new clients in Leeds, Leicester, Bournemouth and London and writing stuff here pales a little compared to that. I don't know if there's a reward for bothering to write stuff. It would be arrogant of me to assume anyone has ever read this, but similarly I'll have to have a good look at myself if I'm just writing to myself.

Anyway, life and business are good now. West Ham have bought someone decent, Ebbsfleet have bought someone called Michael Gash (snigger), my car's brakes are fixed and it's not long until the V Festival. I can't be bothered to write an more than that.

Free music! Who's paying?

My marketing brain tells me that illegal downloading is in fact good for the music industry, but not particular artists. I want to write a bit about this. Looking back to the advent of true mass music (which dates from the 1880s), there's a constant factor of expensive media. To get your message to thousands or millions of people, you had to pay someone to make thousands or millions of recordings of it for you. This was even true in the days of home-taping, as anyone with a tape-to-tape deck will tell you. When recordings were made of tapes, things like Dolby's "B Noise Reduction" were necessary to remove the hiss that came with most recordings. Even when CDs became prevalent, making a copy was fairly expensive. Pirate operations did so, but not on a scale that meant Bono ever went without his dinner. This led to a type of process-led orientation that saw massive acts emerge. Acts including Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Monkees, Metallica, Genesis, Elton John, Madonna and a host of others were successful for reasons as well as their talents. They were the record companies' chosen ones. Record companies had to punt on who to make huge quantities of pressings for and that required huge budgets; making the record itself and then marketing it ate up hundreds of thousands of sales worth of profits. Those bands were always likely to be successful because such huge budgets were thrown at them, we heard their music. Top of the Pops (and its American equivalents) played a tiny proportion of music that was being released and even now, watching TOTP2 on UK Gold, is clear that big acts were at the forefront of our music-awareness well before the songs were selling ("Here's the new one from Spandau Ballet - it's in the shops on Monday!!!" - and the BBC don't advertise....). Now it's just as easy for an act to get their music recorded, mixed and released online as they want it to be. Free software can now turn out a whole CD's worth of tracks. The marketing men have few options. Good music now (and when you say it out loud it sounds like it was inevitable all along) bubbles to the top because it's good, but at the expense of massive sales for a small number of bands. It's hard to see where the next REM, U2 or Green Day are coming from. Even the Foo Fighters are who they are because Dave Grohl was part of Nirvana and the publicity that came with Kurt Cobain shooting himself in the head was worth millions and millions. That pre-requisite has gone.

It's interesting to see the legal downloading has led to a few new market forces in the music industry:

- Non-released tracks from albums can outsell released ones.
- Unsigned bands can get in the charts (Koopa were the first to make the top 40, with the puerile but fun "No Trend").
- Cheaper marketing methods are needed to make sales. These include email marketing, viral campaigns and Web 2.0 (including Myspace and Facebook). Advertising doesn't make as much difference, especially now media owners are hiking up costs of advertising to mass media.

Illegal marketing however means that the most powerful method of all - word-of-mouth - is available. Clever usage (including the time-limited nature of file sharing on Microsoft's new "Zune" mp3 player) of this means huge distribution, far in excess of sales that the artist could have generated in any other way on their own. Some of the bands who have made a career while watching fans listen to their music for nothing include Kate Nash, Get Cape.Wear Cape.Fly, David Ford, Colin Macintyre, James and loads more. Even the meteorically rising Newton Faulkner would have struggled to be heard ten years ago. Indeed he broke into the scene properly when he (and his website) stopped being called "Newton Battenburg Faulkner", which is how he was billed when I stumbled across him supporting Tim Freedman at Ronnie Scotts'. The day after I saw him live I started looking online and struggled to find him or his web site.

The upshot of all that (and I really didn't think I was going to write this much when I started) is that the acts who might have made it huge have to fight it out with the acts without money. The days of massive acts making it and earning hundreds of millions from lucrative deals are possibly gone. The exception seems to be the big R&B and Hip-Hop acts for now. I think that the level playing field is good for music as there seem to be more proper musicians getting heard. I just wonder if they're making a living doing so. I'd certainly suggest that many of them wouldn't have much advantage if downloading didn't exist.

As a music fan I love the fact that I can download a track to see what it's like, but I'm a bit different to many in that I tend to do one of two things with the download: delete it if it's rubbish or use it to base a purchase on. I like having CDs and have a more varied collection now than ever. When the line-up of for the V Festival is announced, I fire up my computer and download all the bands' music that I haven't heard of. Then when I go to the festival, I don't get bored by Keane when I could be listening to Ozomatli or something interesting. Bands whose stuff I've bought after downloading include: InMe, Ozomatli, Gogol Bordello, Easyworld, Ben's Brother, Mohair, Ragmop, Stephen Fretwell, My Morning Jacket, Get Cape.Wear Cape.Fly, Morning Runner and a dozen or so others. There's not one of them that I would have sought without prompting. If Easyworld for instance had spent fortunes marketing to me I might have found them, but at the expense of the others (assuming that record companies write media plans and look at their competitors releases and adjust their spends accordingly).

Ripping from CDs seems to be different. I can see why artists are concerned about illegal downloading, but doesn't the massive reaction of many musicians smack of a lack of confidence in their music? Either they want to commercialise it, in which case the quality ought to be good and illegal downloading should encourage sales and attendance at live events, or it's not to be commercialised and it doesn't matter who downloads it. Ripping then burning replicas of whole albums seems to be a step further. Even so, if someone borrows a CD, rips it, likes it, then buys the CD, doesn't that have a nice happy ending? How or why do you stop that without losing the sale that came along with it?

Seth Godin, the author of "Purple Cow", sees it simply: The more you give away, the more you get back. He's not preaching karma, he's a marketing expert who believes that the true, long-lasting successes in the commercial world have made it by giving their stuff away: Krispy Kreme (give away several million donuts a year), Borough Market (free lovely food!) and countless others are in his books and make perfect examples of selling on quality or not selling at all.

Now I'm going to make a cup of tea. Speak soon.

Two in two days - an unlikely pace to keep up

Maybe nobody's ever going to see this, so it'll be okay that I've started in a flurry. Yesterday I said that I'd be going on and on about illegal downloading and also the wondrous MyFootballClub project.

www.myfootballclub.co.uk was set up in 2007 by Will Brooks. His vision was to get lots of people to chip in £35 and buy a football club with the money. He did this (and this is really cutting the story down) and now I, along with 29,600 others, own Ebbsfleet United FC. It used to be called Gravesend & Northfleet, but a clever sponsorship deal with Eurostar saw all that change. If you've the slightest interest in football, democracy, forums, blogs, podcasts or online social networking, pay your £35 and join. It is sensational: I've been to games, met other members and this Friday, Nathan from Tuscon, Arizona arrives to stay at my place so he can watch the mighty Ebbsfleet in their first ever FA Trophy Final at Wembley. Awesome.

From next season, we the members will be picking the team. We already vote on every major decision (we picked next season's kit, ticket prices, the manager's right to buy players and lots of other things) but soon, the team that succeed or fail will be chosen by a mass of unqualified aspiring football managers. I might quit running Sponge NB and take over the team if I'm any good. Join me - the forums are a good laugh and the people range from deranged to remarkable.

As for illegal downloading, I'm going to wait until tomorrow. It's coming together in my head, but I might just sound like an idiot if I'm not careful. A nice short entry today then. Speak soon.

So this is the first bit, where it all seems a bit pointless

I was talking to a friend of mine who suggested that the way to the top of the search rankings was a blog. I don't know if that's true - my little company does quite well sitting high in Google's rankings, so I don't think I'm doing this because of that. One of my clients made me realise why I like to write these sorts of things, describing me as a maven - someone who likes to pass on useful, intelligent nuggets of information. I suppose that this is an effort to group my little outbursts of info into one place, maybe reaching a wider audience and maybe not.

In any case, I'm going to start by making a little recommendation about a band I heard. I'm a music fan, but this isn't a music blog. It's a blog extolling the best of lots of things. In terms of new music, I'd like to shout about I Was A Cub Scout - a small band at the moment, but with more to come. I'm quite good at spotting the next bands to do well, even if it's not the "chart success" version of doing well. I was listening to Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly long before their first CD appeared. Same for David Ford. There are more, but it gets boring to list. Anyway, IWACS (I Was A Cub Scout) are a two-piece that bring in more musicians on stage to build huge, very British anthemic pop-rock. They supported The Wombats at Brixton Academy at the weekend and were better than them. Download the song "Save your wishes" or just buy the CD "I want you to know that there is always hope". Put it in your car, wind down the windows and enjoy.


Another little mention in my moment of sub-fame for unwary companies goes to Ebuyer. I run a little company called Sponge New Business and we have fairly limited IT needs, but have in the past few years bought routers, switches, computers, printers, cables, CPU fans, PSUs and a few other IT supplies. We've tried a few companies, some of them (such as the very bad Eclipse Computers) didn't meet our standards. Ebuyer are exceptional. They are priced within the reach of small companies, yet offer decent volume discounts. Give them a try for cameras, computer bits, tellies, phones, gadgets and other things you plug in.

I've got a moan to post about illegal downloading soon and also one about the fantastic MyFootballClub project. Speak soon.