Last week a man was reportedly facing jail in the US for stealing a guitar from someone's coffin. Another one of those only in America stories I guess. But it made me think about my relationship with music.
To me music IS a matter of life and death...
I don't know where it came from. I'm not musical, I can't play the guitar and despite having a few piano lessons when I was a kid, the truth is it was only because my sister had lessons and I didn't want to miss out. Music is omnipresent in daily life, on tv, on radio, it's the soundtrack to our lives. The rhythms of life move to a musical beat.
So why is it that we value music so little these days? In my lifetime we've gone from selling singles for £3.99 on a 7" disc made of plastic, to the same not even being 'worth' 79 pence to download. In the same time people will happily pay £100 to go to a concert, but wont pay £7-£10 for an album.
Yet, we do still love it. I was reading in Music Week last week, that all the major record labels are gearing up for their seasonal releases in Q4, with new albums arriving from the brilliant Florence + The Machine, Coldplay and James Morrison aswell as stocking filling favourites Westlife, Susan Boyle and Kathryn Jennkins and the usual X Factor artists.
This year, despite overall CD sales being down 14% by value, the overall artist album market is down only 1.1% year on year, so all the major labels are bullishly setting out their Christmas stalls in confident moods. Well they've got to I suppose.
When I wonder is it, that the major labels are going to finally get it and work out why their sales revenues are stalling. For years they've been talking about becoming Entertainment Companies, not just signing acts based on a few good songs, but more so on their ability to generate money across all areas of business. When the wheels started falling off the record sales cart nearly 15 years ago, the major companies were quick to change the contracts they offered from simple recording deals, to what they call 360 deals, capturing income from other areas such as publishing, merchandising, ticket sales and brand associations, rushing to by up the leading companies in these field so they could justify taking their extra slice of the pie.
To a large extent though the major record labels are still falling short on their promises and rarely sign any act that doesnt fit their too cool for school equation; they're not thinking of the act as a business and looking at all of the revenue streams available and capitialising on making money across the whole music industry.
They're still hung up on a set of 12 or 14 songs on an album and whether a select number of djs and producers think they're any good.. The truth is there are very few proper A&R guys left in the industry that can do the job who look at an artist or a band and see the potential. There are a few elder statesman; stalwarts such as the excellent Chris Briggs (newly at Columbia Records), Colin Barlow (who will soon join Briggs at Sony) and Darcus Beese at Island(who signed Amy Winehouse, Jessie J and Mumford & Sons), they get it.
But the problem is below them, they're all so junior, with no business sense or nous enough to see an act's multi-platform potential and they're worried about getting sacked for making the wrong call... so you can guess what happens. Nothing. Read Kill Your Friends, its more like a documentary evidence than a fictional paperback.
What the music industry and major labels need is people working in A&R, who not only go to gigs (most A&Rs rarely go to gigs these days, just looking online at twitter and facebook stats) but can look at acts with proper 360 vision, not just whether a songs good, but at the live proposition, the possibilities for tv and movie syncs, brand associations and endorsements, at the whole picture and at making money across the board. That's the way I work as an active manager in the music industry, it's the potential.
The fact is, we do all love music, it keeps us a live and we take it to our graves. It's part of our spirit and our very soul. The music industry needs to keep itself alive by feeding its fire with the right fuel and acting like a business that is wide eyed alert and ready to live another hundred years and not end up six feet under.
Top Ten Songs to Live or Die By: