It seems that brands are literally all at it. It’s now Intel’s turn to go down the unsigned route with their ‘Intel studio‘ initiative. But unlike the myriad of other ‘battle of the bands’ competitions around at the minute does it offer anything new or different? Our intrepid citizen reports…

Intel is the latest brand tempted to follow down the well-worn route of the ‘battle of the bands’ style contest. And the starting point for each artist is another tried and tested facsimile of Myspace, with the bands having a place to post up their music and provide a bit of information about themselves. Then the sites users (hereafter known as the ‘fans’) get to vote on who gets through to the next round, but just in case ‘the fans’ don’t pick anyone who’s any good the judges also get to pick a ‘wild card’. The sites users (the fans) and the judges both get to pick artists who will go through to the preliminary finals.  If you are lucky you get to play the preliminaries in Camden (no regional heats for this competition, so don’t bother unless you are prepared to make your own way to the capital, and bring your fans along with you) alongside another 13 acts. However, you do get a ’signed’ act to play alongside, no-doubt ensuring that you at least have an audience to play to!

Currently over a thousand bands have entered the competition, although very few ‘fans’ seem to be interested enough to cast their vote widely (well that’s a surprise then). Winners of the first round Killing Cupid have amassed almost 500 votes, but they are in a distinct minority. Most of the artists on the site are lucky to have got one vote (no-doubt their mother’s love them), while a large number have received no votes at all (no-one loves them!). Let’s get this straight. Success has nothing to do with music ‘fans’ like you and me. I’m not sure that there will too how many music ‘fans’ visiting the site and checking out the talent. For most of us hardened music nuts there’s just too much signed music around to listen to. And with tens of thousands of unsigned acts already on Myspace, why make the effort? As our very own Paul Martin has pointed out previously, even the professionals tend to stay well away from these things. So who is doing the voting? Well I suspect this is about the power of marketing, and the ability of a few of the entrants to mobilise each and every last Myspace friend (Killing Cupid have almost 900), as well as getting everyone you know with a computer (including workmates and college buddies) to cast their votes for you. So maybe this should be an award for marketing prowess, but talent? Well let’s leave that to the judges shall we…

The grand finals will take place Proud Galleries in Camden in December, and each band will get to play for a total of six (yes 6) minutes. The judges on the night include:

• an NME scribe
• the Dirty Pretty Thing’s Carl Barat
• a one time producer of the Manic Street Preachers and Ocean Colour Scene
• a former NME scribe who used to manage Razorlight
• and the boss of the KIDS label (home to The Wombats, The Whip and iLiKETRAiNS), who will also have the delight of putting out the first single by the lucky winners.

All of which suggest that unless you are a ‘generic’ indie guitar band, your chances of winning could be somewhat limited, even though a few brave Hip Hop, RnB and Pop acts have entered.

And for the lucky overall winner, the prize is…

• A six-month record contract i.e. one single release (long-term commitment then!)
• The chance to work with a top industry producer and manager for ONE day each (that’s generous!)
• The promotion to give you a real shot at making it - full club promotion, radio promotion and PR for your first single (well you are hardly going to put out a record and not promote it, heavens above you might lose money…oh I forgot singles don’t make money these day, oh well).

citizensound says:

So as ever what’s the likelihood of brand, artists and fans getting something out of this? I’m not if Intel will engender itself to too many young artists who once again get nothing of any real value to show for taking part. While these sort of competitions seem to have little impact on the music-buying public (or should that be music file-sharing public?) for the brand to see any real return on investment. When it comes to the artists, well at least one band will get their chance to win 30 seconds of fame and have a single to show for it (shame that Woolies don’t sell them anymore)…and as always with these sort of Battle Of The Bands events, music fans will no-doubt left feeling a bit nonplussed by the whole event…

Last week while on the London Tube I picked up a copy of free morning newspaper The Metro to find out that it is the latest brand to launch its own unsigned band competition, called On-line & On-Tour 2008, under the strap-line – create, listen, be discovered. Yet another offering that gives us, the humble music fan, a chance to choose the next big thing! Oh, spare me please.

I’ve almost lost count of number of branded unsigned music initiatives in the music space over the last few years. With the majority of brands offering variation on one of two basic themes - MySpace and the ‘Battle Of The Bands’ contest. Or if we are really lucky, a bit of both!

While most brands have learned that they can gain real competitive advantage and standout by ziging when their competitors zag, it seems that when it comes to music that an awful lot of brands are happy to play follow the leader.

So why am I so cynical? The record industry’s success rates is at best roughly 1 in 10 artists managing to recoup the investment put into them. But how many of us could name a artist that has had any level of success from one of these sort of initiatives? Um, I’m struggling too.

However, what I’m not suggesting is that brands stop playing in the unsigned space. If anything this sort of grass routes community-based marketing activity should be encouraged. But maybe part of the problem is that too many brands and their agencies seem to be using MySpace as the yardstick. Although in reality it is may not offer unsigned bands much more than the often much-maligned Battle Of The Bands contest.

I spotted a really insightful response on how effective MySpace is for unsigned artists on a post to an article about the new MySpace music store, by dotcom industry commentator, Om Malik.

Ampbuzz said “People are getting tired of logging in and out of services (such as MySpace) setting up friends, inviting people to join them and what not, so as a band (I have 2 band pages on MySpace) what I find is that the “friends” that you amass are usually just other bands.”

So as I’ve always suspected the majority of people who check out unsigned bands, be it online or at unsigned competitions, are more often than not, other unsigned artists. And not the people they really want to attract, music fans.

citizensound says:

Brands are in many ways are very similar to record companies in that they can offer artists the three things the most need - investment, marketing and distribution,  but on a scale that record companies could only dream of. Now is the time for brave brands to enter into the unsigned space and really make a difference.

We finally got hold of the recording of our DIY: Do or Die session at this year’s Venice Festival Of Media. You can listen to it here or by downloading it to listen to on your computer, iPod or MP3 player. Again a big thanks to Maarten Steinkamp, Jon Webster, Martin Stiksel and John Ingham for making it a fascinating session…

To listen now:

To download the podcast:

For those of you who are PC users, or are not iTunes users, the MP3 version can be downloaded by right clicking your mouse, here

After digging out my Desperate Bicycles records I decided to hunt out my copy of the first single by Scritti Politti. If that name seem familiar it may be from the hits they had in the mid 80s with singles such as Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin) or The Word Girl, or you may even know the blissfull The “Sweetest Girl”, which got to the giddy heights of number 64 in the UK charts back in 1981 (the song was also the opening track on the NME’s C81 cassette which citizen Bay has been digging big time of late). However, before the band became an intellectual pop band much beloved by certain factions of the UK music press, they made a series of independently make scratchy DIY punk records. Scritti founder and current Dalston resident Green Gartside saw the Sex Pistols on the opening night of the Sex Pistols ‘Anarchy’ tour at Leeds University, and decided to form a band.

The band came to London in 1977, moving into a legendary squat in Regent’s Park Road in Camden Town. Scritti Politti were galvanised into actiom the Desperate Bicycles and released their first DIY single, titled ‘Skank Bloc Bologna’ on their own St. Pancras label in 1978. The inside of the sleeve included information on the cost to make the single - recording (£98), mastering (£40), pressing (2,500 7 inch singles for £369.36) , Rubber Stamp and labels (£8), plus information on their distributor Rough Trade Records, then still a record shop in Notting Hill. And just in case you didn’t get the idea he first time around, they printed the costs of producing the John Peel sessions EP on that cover as well.

Green notoriously hates the bands early records, which he claimed “sounds like some anti-produced labour of negativity”, but he finally relented and let his label Rough Trade reissue “Skank Bloc Bologna” on the compilation Early, which brings together the bands first four singles and EPs. The album is available for download at emusic, or you can buy the album from the Rough Trade shop here, for the bargain price of only £6.99!

During our DIY panel at the Venice Festival of Media, the panellists were inevitably asked about what we thought about the recent deal between Proctor & Gamble TAG deodorant spray and Def Jam records.

In case you haven’t heard, TAG records has been set up by both parties to find new hip hop talent and promote them through integrated marketing approaches that P&G have immense experience in.

The rumours state-side is that the marketing budget will be a ‘multi-million dollar’ effort

Given that exposure is what so many artists require, connecting with a brand to secure increased exposure seems good business sense. For the brand, they have a chance to appeal to the urban demographic in the U.S. and are seen to be giving something back to the community. This fits with the P&G ethos shared by Bernhard Glock, their head of global media and communications, at Venice, which separates this deal with the rather ridiculous offer by McDonald’s to pay Hip Hop artists to mention their brand name in lyrics!

So on the face of it, it seems like a great move.

However, our panel at Venice were not 100% convinced. And I also have a couple of reservations.

First, the marketing budget will promote the artist first or the brand first? If it is the brand first, that is still a good opportunity, much like a sync deal can help get an artist exposure. However, I would encourage the artists to manage their expectations of what the marketing budget will achieve for them.

Second, my concern rests with Def Jam. This name is more than a label. This is one of the few labels that stood for something more than just music. My concern is whether the legitimacy of the Def Jam name might get eroded due to this deal, no matter how well intentioned all parties are.

This is the difficult path that all artists, managers and labels face as they look for alternative revenue streams.

citizensound says:

Deals with brands will become less of an issue though as more artists and fans find brands that get involved with the right spirit. It feels that the spirit is there in the P&G/Def Jam deal. However, the proof in the pudding will come on three fronts:

First, the brand shifts more units

Second, the artists are credible and get the break they deserve

Third, the music fan loves the music

I came across a great blog called Little Hits last night. Each week or so they post up a favourite track from often long forgotten records, the majority being from the punk and post punk era. As the site’s owners are based in the US it’s quite amazing how many obscure British punk and indie records they managed to get their hands on! You can listen to all the tracks they write about on the site, and if like me you are of a certain age, listened to Peel nightly in the late 1970s and early 80s, and bought lots of obscure 7 inch singles, this will be a great trip down memory lane.

One of the featured tracks on the site is by the wonderful Desperate Bicycles. I can still remember hearing the band on John Peel’s Radio 1 show. Their first session consisted of four tracks, one a version of their début single Smokescreen which lasted all of 50 seconds (the single version was padded out to a progtastic 2 minutes). The band managed to press up 1500 copies of the single, with money from the first 500 records being used to press up and distribute the next 1000. Fortunately I’m a proud owner of said single, bought back in the day from the New Record Inn in Sunderland.

One of my favourite singles by the band was their sophomore effort The Medium Was Tedium. The playing on the record makes many of their punk contemporaries sound like ELP, even the mighty Fall sound competent in comparison. But the brilliance of song was its hook, which extolled “It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it”. And it was. And we did. This was the DIY punk ethic in action. The sleeve detailed the cost to record, press and distribute Smokescreen was a massive £153, (probably a few grand in today’s money). It’s amazing to think that 30 years later the total cost to make, distribute and market your own DIY release can be virtually zero! Sadly Desperate Bicycles founder Danny Wigley has resisted the reissue of any of the bands music, but if you fancy taking a trip down memory lane, or want to hear what all the fuss was about back in 1977, you can hear much of the bands recorded output here.

When I stood up to start the panel at Venice, I was looking for a way to immediately frame the topic so that the audience understood what they were about to sit through.

So I mentioned a journey I took on the 137 bus in south London one day…

There were five kids on the back of the bus. One had recorded some beats on his laptop the night before. He had uploaded them to his phone to play them to his friends on the bus on the way to school. The friends told him which beats they liked and which ones they didn’t. The kid then deleted the ones from his phone that his friends didn’t like. The ones they liked, he bluetoothed the tunes to them all.

Now for me this summed up what is DIY culture, and why for me the rise of DIY music culture is so much more than a mere fad. Right on the back of the bus, I witnessed the CREATION, DISTRIBUTION, MARKETING and CONSUMPTION of music amongst those five kids.

And it happened without the help of anyone from the ‘music industry’. The help of handset and laptop manufacturers maybe, but no-one from the ‘music industry’. This is as pure a version of DIY music as one could imagine.

This is the challenge for the music industry to work through. How are they relevant to the kids on the back of that bus?

It is also for brands to work out if they wish to get involved in music in ways other than writing a massive cheque to a major artist and hoping that the celebrity factor rubs off on the brand. (Don’t get me wrong, such deals can be highly successful, benefiting fan, artist and the brand, but involvement within the DIY culture can provide different benefits for the brand, artist and fan).

Seeing this DIY music culture in action really excited me. This gave me the inspiration to dig deeper into DIY music culture. First, I carried out some research in 2007 with Dr. Gauti Sigthorsson, lecturer at Greenwich University, and now an honorary citizen of citizensound. Anyone interested in finding out more on this, I will post up some interesting snippets we found out in later posts.

Nick and I also ran a panel at In The City in 2007 on this very topic, exploring what artists need as support functions in order to survive as a DIY artist. As an example of DIY music culture, we invited Rob McCulloch to join us on stage, a guy who invited his fans to pay what they want for his CD…18 months before Radiohead. Average price for his CD was £11/€15/$22! Admittedly smaller audience, but impressive nevertheless.

This and more inspired citizensound to choose this topic for the panel. But it all started with those 5 kids on the 137 bus in London…

Come back to the blog as we will be sharing more on this.

One minute we are on the stage at the Venice festival of media discussing the impact of a DIY revolution on the music business, and a few days later the Sunday Times Style magazine is running an article about the very same topic!

And as if by serendipity, the article is about Manchester band the Ting Tings, who recent signed to Sony BMG, whose European CEO Maarten Steinkamp was one of our speakers at Venice. We promise that neither of these two events were connected.

The key for the Ting Tings was to ensure that no matter who the signed to, they would retain complete creative control of there music. This may seem to an outsider as only a small concession on the label’s part, but this a a big leap of faith for any major record company when it comes to a totally unproven new act.

And in true DIY spirit, the album cost pretty much nothing to make. No expensive recording studio in the south of France for these guy’s, with the band using Pro Tools and Garageband (an application that comes free with your Mac laptop) to record the album in their own home studio. While they also decided to use their home-made lo-fi video for their single, That’s Not My Name, in preference to the usual big budget record company promo.

Encouragingly the Sunday Times not only suggested that the DIY revolution would allow artists to take control of their own destiny, but also suggested we should all go out and make our own DIY music, movies, fanzines, novels and fashion labels. Let’s hope this hasn’t given Peaches Geldof or Paris Hilton any new ideas!

The Music Industry is going through a time of repositioning, where record labels, concert promotors, music distributors, digital retailers and artist managers are vying for the position as the one-stop shop for their clients - the artists. CD sales are falling fast while people are paying inflated prices to see their favourite band live. Artists are ready to seek investment from Venture Capitalists or sign up to brand partnerships. It is a fascinating time to be involved in the music space. Nothing though is more exciting than the clear trend towards the DIY ethic in music.

Whether it is an established act - such as Radiohead or Simply Red - or young unsigned artists (such as Holly Rose (opposite) who will be appearing at the Venice Festival of Media Gala Dinner), musicians are looking to do it for themselves. Technology has something to do with it, making the distribution of music an easier thing to do. Partly, it is just a sense that ‘there is another way’. A way that gives the artist control over their own destiny. The DIY artist will still need the right people around them to find the right investment, or get the best distribution. Yet distribution doesn’t mean anyone will discover the music. How do they get noticed? Is it still about getting in the van/train/private jet and doing lots of gigs? Or will the online social networks do the work for them? And are the challenges for established acts any different?

The music industry has responded by re-shaping in front of our eyes. All artists are having to work out who best serves their interests.

And then we have the fans. They can find more music than ever before. They are more fickle than ever. They can make up their own personal Top 10 every minute, and can use free peer-to-peer services to pick one song and move on.

The artist wonders:

• Where is the fanbase going to come from?
• How do we hold on to them?
• How can we get standout now that everyone has cheap
• and easy access to marketing and distribution?
• Who can we turn to for help?

Exactly the same challenges face each and every brand. Who do they turn to? As for their marketing services partners, the race is on to offer the right kind of services that brands need to deal with the world in 2008.

You can find out more about this very subject at our DIY: Do… Or Die session at the Venice Festival of Media 2008 from 1:45 to 2:45 on Tuesday 15th of April at 1.45pm

In almost twenty years as an A&R person in the record industry I've seen plenty of Battle Of The Bands competitions come and go. Did I ever think to show any interest in any of the artists that came through these competitions, not really. Was I unusual, certainly not. So why is the music industry so disinterested in these brands initiatives, at a time when shows like X Factor are making their creators millions?

By focussing purely on the competition angle in 'Battle Of The Bands' style competitions brands enter the arena at one point and often leave soon after. While the bands seem to enter a revolving door where they are spun around for a moment and then left either back where they started, or in slightly different place. Dizzy with raised expectations, but in reality no better off.

Timing is key to a band or an artist becoming successful, and yet there is no judgement of where a band is at in their early stage of development in any of these competitions. The music being good should be enough, everybody thinks so, but in reality it's not. History is littered with amazing artists who never sold many records in their careers, only to be revived decades later as a cult artist. Music is not alone in this, as it happens in all avenues of culture from authors to painters, many of whom die before they are discovered. 

But all is not lost, its a question of looking at strategy. The competition is only a small part of the equation.

It's not just winning a competition that matters. What matters is what other things are going on for the band, and in particular how the media perceives them - be it the press, radio or TV. None of the Battle Of The Bands competitions are respected by these institutions, or for that matter by the music industry, all of whom are critical to any ongoing success for any artist. In fact winning a competition can sometimes impact negatively on the winners credibility. It doesn't seem to matter if you win Pop Idol, but how would that change if it was Rock or Rap Idol, would you still be taken seriously? 

It's the same in the MySpace world, where millions of bands, both signed and unsigned, are easily accessible at the touch of the button. How do you distinguish between them all? What makes one band successful, and not another? It's partly down to the music, but its also about the ideas that surround the band and more importantly the infrastructure. Without this a band can win as many competitions as they like, but their careers wont go anywhere, because they don't have the basic tools they need to develop their careers.

citizensound says:

Nowadays there are different ways of developing an infrastructure, but any competition that pays no attention to this, and lacks any form of follow through will fail in the eyes of both the bands and the fans, and become valueless. It's like trying to build a house by starting with the roof, without ensuring that it has the foundations to support it.