There’s a fascinating discussion on The New Yorker about the future for musicians in a world of widespread piracy and tiny payments from streaming music services.

The working question is not about the life of a band like Wilco but of smaller outfits, where making a living is sometimes not even a question, when a day job is the only option. How do we think of music when the chances of it providing a living salary are incredibly small? What is the positive viable future for marginal (not a bad word) and independent artists?

I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot recently as I’ve been writing about the Pirate Bay and going to talks by people like Love and Money’s James Grant, who rightly says that the internet has taken the money out of recorded music. As I wrote on techradar the other day, there is now an entire generation that’s grown up unwilling to pay for music. “Sell t-shirts and tour!” is usually the response to that, or if you’re big you can always get Samsung to sponsor you. But what happens to the artists who don’t have a big enough fanbase to live off merch revenues, the ones whose music has to be made in the short spaces between the day job and sleep?

Even touring isn’t the cash cow it’s often claimed to be. DJ Jace Clayton:

The Internet overvalues newness, and live-show attendance follows suit. The deluge of music in our digital lives means that discovery is sped up alongside digestion—Oh, I streamed their single, saw their video clip, can extrapolate the live show. Scenes become useful insofar as they are patient organisms, interested in slow changes and small differences, less enmeshed in online attention cycles—but you need to reach across them to be able to tour.

I’m not coming at this from the perspective of someone who misses the old days – as I sorta-joked the other day, the £5 I made from the first sale of Good Times, High Times and Hard Times is £5 more profit than I ever made from being in bands – but I do think it’s harder than ever for musicians to get paid for what they do.

Maybe Mick Jagger is right:

When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone! Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone. So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.

 

This was the first song we actually finished, and we treated it rather like an expensive ornament made from the finest china, terrified to go near it in case we broke it and couldn’t fix it again. Finishing songs is often a bit like Father Ted trying to get a little dent out of a car, a process that ends up destroying every bit of metal on the vehicle. Luckily Halfway House managed to avoid that particular fate.

This one is quite an old song: I wrote it as a simple acoustic track years ago, and David had a go at it because he fancied messing around with the e-bow. Where Grip Is Slipping contained a wee homage to Frankie Goes To Hollywood, this one’s saying hello to The Specials: David’s e-bow really reminded me of the spooky sounds in Ghost Town, so there was no way I’d be able to resist sticking a brass section in there.

Finishing this song was a real Eureka moment for me: I’d actually made something that sounded exactly as it did in my head.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, allow me to introduce DMGM: poppy rock music and rocky pop music from Scotland. Yep, it’s me and David, and we’ve been working on this stuff for ages. I mean it: some of the vocals are older than my daughter.

The embedded audio in this post is from Bandcamp, where you can buy individual tracks or the entire album for whatever price you choose (including free if you so wish, although Bandcamp only offers a limited number of downloads per month so you might need to move quickly if you want freebies). We’re on Soundcloud too, and the music should appear in your favourite streaming music service and/or MP3 download shop over the next few days.

This is the opening track, Grip is Slipping. It started off with me messing around and sticking unlikely things together – in this case, human beatboxing and pedal steel guitar (sorry to disappoint, but the beatbox isn’t me: that’s just one reason why we don’t have any plans to play live) – and turned into something quite odd. Musically we’re having quite a lot of fun here: the massed backing vocals make me think of old Hollywood musicals, the half-spoken backing vocals are a deliberate homage to Frankie Goes To Hollywood (specifically their massively underrated Liverpool album), and the bass line makes me think of an enormous elastic band. It’s a big bouncy beast of a song, sad lyrics set to a Godzilla stomp.

Get the impression I like this one?

I know I’m usually self-deprecating to the point where I’ll claim everything I’ve ever done is rubbish, but I’m really proud of these songs: David and I have worked really hard on them and put our hearts and souls into the music, and I’d be very grateful to anyone who can help get the music to more people. If you like what you hear I’d appreciate it if you could share the songs with others.

Incidentally, if anybody’s looking for instrumental music for a video they’re doing, a podcast they’re making, a radio show or whatever, I’m quite happy to get instrumental versions of the songs to you – drop me an email, gary at this website address. And I’d love to hear from anyone with visual ideas to go with the songs, because our video budget is exactly zero.

In terms of who did what, David did guitars, ebow, keyboards and computers, I did singing, guitars, bass and more computers, and the loops we used came from Apple, Beta Monkey Music and The Loop Loft. The songs are all by the two of us, with the exception of the two Kasino songs we redid: those were co-written with Chris Warden, Mark Clinton and Calum Angus MacArthur, although our versions are very, very different from the ones we did back then.

If you’d like to read our biography and a bit of background, it’s after the link. Unless you’ve come directly to this post, in which case it’s after this sentence.

(more…)

Regular readers will know that I used to be in a band, and that I’ve been meaning to upload all the old stuff for ages. I’ve finally got round to it, and (most) of the Kasino stuff is now on Bandcamp. If you’re not aware of my occasionally shameful past, Kasino were a Glaswegian rock band from the late 1990s until 2004, and we had some good songs.

(There are a few gaps, incidentally, so if anybody out there has old Kasino / pre-Kasino stuff on CD/good quality MP3 that isn’t on bandcamp, please drop me a line: I’m gary@ this website address.)

It’s been a really odd experience listening to it all: lots of good memories, of course, but also a lot of frustration: if we’d just done this, if I’d just said no to that, if we’d only tried that. As I wrote a few months ago:

No matter how talented the musicians you’re working with, and I’ve been lucky enough to work with some really talented people, if your songs aren’t finished and the recordings are rushed then you’re not going to produce something you’re really proud of.

That doesn’t apply to all the songs – there’s plenty of stuff, especially the more recent stuff, that still gives me chills – but it applies to enough that I can’t really enjoy the nostalgia as much as I’d like to. The really old, late 90s stuff is particularly hard for me to listen to because I made the mistake of adopting the singing voice my then-bandmates wanted, which was a sore-throat growl. I wish I’d known back then what I do now about singing and how to express yourself without going WAAAARGH GRAARGH GRAAAAGH on the loud bits.

Coming back to the songs years later is interesting, especially the really old songs: I can think of quite a few songs that could have been killers but were mucked up for whatever reason. It can be quite interesting to approach an old song with more experienced ears: for example, David and I have rebooted two Kasino songs in our new musical incarnation, DMGM. We’ve redone Fall from Grace and You Don’t Have To Be Alone as more electronic songs, and they work much better in that genre. (I know I’ve been talking about new stuff for ages, but I’m in the final, nitpicking stage of mixing and mastering the songs now. They’ll be online by the end of this month, hopefully sooner.)

I haven’t uploaded the old songs because I expect to make money, wow the planet or even get any attention; I’ve uploaded them because they’re like old photographs: they’re snapshots of good times, high times and hard times.

* That’s a very old in-joke: friends of ours, Mercury Tilt Switch, were once reviewed as “a rock type band from Dundee”.

Radio Scotland’s been giving this quite a lot of airplay recently, and quite right too: it’s lovely.

I’ve mentioned a few times that the iPhone 5 is much quieter than the iPhone 4/4S on some headphones, such as my Atomic Floyd Superdarts, and I suggested using the Denon Audio app to boost the volume. It’s better, but it isn’t perfect: if you’re trying to address a lack of low-end thump, as I am, it runs out of puff long before you’re happy.

There’s a more elegant solution, but it’ll cost you £20: the FIIO E6 headphone amp. It’s good for ten hours between charges, it’s the size of a large postage stamp and it’s bloody brilliant.

If you’ve moved to the iPhone 5 and feel your headphones now lack oomph, this’ll solve your problems. I’m really impressed by it.

This is just lovely. One of AMOK’s stand-out tracks stripped down to a single voice and piano.

(From ITV’s Jonathan Ross show, May 2013)

I blogged about an Eels gig seven years ago, and not much has changed: I still love Eels and I hate gigs. Last night’s show was a belter, although if you hadn’t heard the new album you’d be a bit lost: E’s gone for a garagey, three-guitar line-up this time around and the set was heavy on the new stuff (although there was time for some superb covers: Itchycoo Park and Fleetwood Mac’s Oh Well). If you’re seeing them on this tour, just one bit of advice: don’t head out when the house lights go up.