DIY culture is throwing up some interested new record labels, that are more than just labels, but are building on the relationship with the visual arts.

Home Tapes, based in Portland, Oregon is home to a group of bands and musicians such as left field Hip-Hop stars CYNE and the excellent Slaraffenland, and a bunch of visual artists including personal favourites Evah Fan and the very excellent Friends With You.

The label was “born to allow musical and visual artists a place to collaborate and experiment without the constraints, pressures, and delays of traditional releases. We want to get back to our roots and make things with our own hands late at night on impossible schedules and all for the fun of just doing it. There are no specific rules or guidelines, and all formats are welcome. Limited edition, by default”.

I also recently came across Uninhabitable Mansions, which is a Brooklyn-based art collective and band. They make music and publish books and do a few other things. The band features Robbie and Tyler of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Annie from Au Revoir Simone.

It’s nice to see that they art of collaboration hasn’t disappeared, and that bands are finding the solutions to getting their art out there.

Robert Wolf, London musician and drumming teacher to my son, is finishing up his album right now. Getting noticed is a big challenge for every musician, but there was something he said to me today that really resonated.

He said is is going to make his music

sound irresistible

How many musicians aim for that?

In fact, how many brands aim to sound irresistible these days?

Well, we at citizensound are on a mission to help brands sound irresistible to their consumers and help musicians sound irresistible to their fans.

So I guess we want to sound irresistible too…

here is our sound by the way…

Citizen Dub by citizensound

…Speech Dabelle.

Wish I’d had the common sense to put a few quid on this, the citizensound favourite  for this year’s Mercury Music Prize. And YES once again we got it right!

Former Mercury Award winner and fellow citizen Paul Martin, who won it with Roni Size Reprazent in ‘97 (famously beating Radiohead’s OK Computer) thought she might win, especially as he’d put on one of her first gigs at the David Simon/Wire event at Book Slam back in May, which he also DJed at. And once he played his fellow citizens her debut single we all feel in love with both Speech and her music.

Fantastic that someone so young, fresh and talented should win. Proves that the Mercury’s are one of the few music awards that genuinely pick the winner based on artistic merit, not the buzz on Hype Machine…

I admit to being a teenage vinyl junkie. The way the sleeves looked and felt, the way the vinyl sounded, and even smelt, made it a truly sensory experience that became almost a life long obsession. But in the late 80’s, like so many, I was lured by the portability and ease of use of the CD.

So why after dedicating some 25 years of my life fetishizing these physical bits of product, did I give them up for a load of zeros and ones that you couldn’t even touch?

Well my love affair with Vinyl was ended by space restraints and it’s lack of portability. But the CD was far easier to give up. Jewel Cases were nasty and plastic, while digipacks weren’t much better. The booklets were small and impossible to read (even with perfect 20/20 vision), and added little to the experience of listening to the music.

Had the art of great sleeve design been lost?

The advent of the download allowed music fans to carry around their entire music collection (or a good chunk of it) in their pocket. OK the MP3’s sound quality wasn’t brilliant, but the ability to have so more songs at our fingertips was just too good to not get hooked.

And it also offered the record industry a new way of packaging music that could be fun, entertaining, interactive, and more enticing than a 3½ inch square CD booklet.

So what did we get? The front sleeve shrunk down to something like the size of a postage stamp, and if you were really lucky a PDF of the crap CD booklet that you never much liked in the first place.

Had the download lost what made owning music special, its physicality?

So it was no surprise to hear last week that the embattled major record companies are about to repackage the humble download with a new format called CMX, that will deliver an enhanced digital experience, or if you must, the 2.0 version of the album sleeve!

But just to make things more complicated Apple have also announced it’s own new packaging format, Project Cocktail; no-doubt in an attempt to stave off competition from Amazon and Spotify, as well proving to the music business that Apple’s (long) tail can still wag the dog.

So why has it taken nine years from the launch of the iTunes store for the industry to put packaging on the agenda?

These new formats may persuade fusty old music fans like me to invest IF what is being offered lives up to the promise. With today’s digital technology this should be easily attainable, and offers a new generation of digital ’sleeve’ designers with a whole new palate to work with.

However, this may just be false dawn for an industry that is no-doubt hoping that this will get us to buy downloads rather than knick them, or as one suspects, get us to pay even more than £7.99 for our digital albums.

So what might stop these new formats being successful?

1. The inevitable format war between Apple and the Majors could once again confuse consumers, hampering any attempt to get us all excited about this new music experience.
2. Are we ready to go out and buy all our music in yet another format? If this new experience is allied with a dramatic increase in sound quality (can we have 320 kbps as standard, please) it may convince a few ardent music fans to invest in their favourite music one more time. But will the mass market really care?
3. These new formats seem to ignore the fact that many consumers (and especially the under 25’s) don’t give two hoots for the album format. The download market is about single tracks not albums. And with so many 80 minute-plus albums being released these days, even potential classics can seem bloated and flabby. So no surprise that today’s music fans either cherry pick the tracks they like from iTunes, or simply illegally download the whole album, and dump the tracks they don’t like.

citizensound says:

Are these new formats too little too late, only persuading the over 30s and music geeks like me to buy into this new format? Or will streaming music services such as Spotify provide to be the mass markets choice for how we consume music? And more importantly does this provide yet another diversion from the real job in hand for the record industry - which is developing what role they play in managing the relationship between the band and their fans, and proving to both artists and their managers that they are the best people to do the job…

While at Unconvention last week I met up with Rich Dale, bass player in Befast based Escape Act. Rich has been invovled in the grass-roots music business in Northern Ireland for 15 year, and  was one of the coordinators at Unconvention in Belfast. With brands increasingly playing in the DIY and unsigned arena Rich gave me his thoughts on how brands can best work with brands at a grass-roots level. You can check out Escape Acts music here

Martin Atkins, legendary drummer with Public Image Ltd., Ministry and Killing Joke was one of the speakers at Unconference. He shared some of thoughts on the DIY music business as well as some of the insights from his new book Tour:Smart, the ultimate guide to the business of touring. Martin took a few minutes of his time to explain how he has sustained a career in music over almost 30 years, why the DIY ethic is still important and why the only contstant when it comes to the music business it change!

I attended my first Unconvention this weekend, a music conference for the grass roots music industry held in Salford, Manchester.  The first panel session I attended at the event, Outside The Box, looked at what it was like for those musicians and labels who choose to operate outside of the mainstream of the music industry, and what alternative ways they’d found that allowed them to be successful.

All the panelists had a different theory on what success looked like, but all of them agreed it didn’t revolve around massive CD sales or sold out stadium tours. For Caroline Churchill, aka Caro Snatch, “everyday I’m being paid to be creative, that feels like success to me”. While Abigail Seabrook, who has gone from being in indie bands to leading a unique 18th ‘pop band’ defined success as a process which has changed as she’s got older, but pointed out that she would tell her younger self that there are many more ways to make a living out of music than chasing the big record deal. Or as Steve Lawson put it you can have success without having hit records, then spending the rest of your life on a tour bus.

But they all agreed that all artists who choose work outside of the normal structure of a label/manage relationship that it was really important to have a plan and to keep returning to it regularly to ensure that you were achieving your goals.

But for this for this level of independence to succeed meant you also had to be resourceful, inventive and industrious when it comes to building and then managing the relationship you have with your fans. But as Steve Lawson put it “500,000 fans and no money would be a fantastic problem for any artist to have”.

On Monday evening I went to First Monday, a music industry networking night run by Sybill Bell, who manages the rather excellent Post War Years.

Much of the talk was not about doing label deals, but how to raise money for the artists to do it themselves.

Recording and distribution seemed not to much of an issue for them (one manger had an act who have already made £4K from selling their demos on iTunes), but the big problem was finding money needed to pay for marketing.

With VC funds all but dried up, managers are looking for other ways to raise funds. One manager was investigating whether to sell shares in the band to friends, family and fans, but was worried that they could end up owning nothing if they had to sell too much of the bands equity. A pretty scary option when you consider the success rates of the majority of bands and artists.

My suggestion was rather than selling equity in his band that he looked at other ways of getting friends, family and fans to invest. Playing for your fans in their own homes can offer something really different, and this personal approach is more likely to generate money than playing endless unsigned nights at local pubs and clubs. However, some fans are happy pay for even greater access to their favourite band or artist. Former Nine Inch Nails drummer Josh Freese got one fan to pay $20,000 dollars to spend some quality time with the drummer and his rock star pals! However, he also offered up a whole range of other special packages to his fans at a range of price points (in this case from a $7 CD to a $75,000 package that includes Freese writing, recording and releasing a 5-song EP about you and your life story), a strategy that can be adopted by any artist.

It looks like I spoke too soon about the benefits of emusic’s deal with Sony Music for the users. What wasn’t immediately clear was the impact on the price that users would have to pay for their downloads. Some of the most loyal users have seen a 40-50%  increase in the price they are paying. And the response from the users have been staggering. emusic has received well over 1000 complaints in the last four days on their blog and message boards. And for Sony it seems that many of emusic’s most loyal users aren’t that interested in their back catalogue, at least not if it means doubling the cost of their music.

Since launch emusic has played a delicate balancing act between price and choice. They have kept  their prices low, so encouraging users to try lots of new music. This has been great for some artists and labels, but sadly it doesn’t seem to have provided adequate compensation for some of the independent labels who aren’t prepared to sell their music quite so cheaply.

However, it seems that the model simply wasn’t working for either emusic or the labels, and now the users are also up in arms. This whole episode brings up the age old question, what is the value of music, and to whom? Sadly the gap between the fans and the labels seems to be increasing, not getting closer.

Yesterday’s New York Times announced that Sony Music will be making some of their back catalogue available via download store emusic in the US, which up till now has only carried music from independent labels.

Although the major labels have never been keen on emusic’s pricing policy (an average 40 cents per track), the site’s ability to ‘long tail’ music via it’s extensive community has finally proved a big enough attraction for one of the major’s to finally cut a deal.

Although Chris Anderson’s ‘Long Tail’ effect has been criticised in some quarters, emusic is a rare example of a download store where the users are as interested in the so-called ‘misses’ as they are in the ‘hits’.

Sony like every other major label has some real treasures hidden away in their back-catalogue, and emusic’s community is one that will delight in discovering these fantastic hidden classics, in a way that iTunes users may not.

What emusic ably demonstrates is the importance that both community and recommendation play in driving music purchase.