New Music - Part 18 - PJP Band - ...and so it goes

I can honestly say that, whilst most of my family live there, in the more than six years of writing this blog I have never once mentioned a band that is based in Plymouth.
Until today...
... and so it goes - PJP Band. I certainly didn't see this coming, so thanks to Amazing Radio for alerting me this evening. It is a fine album, indeed I have since spent too much time listening to it streamed. Better still it is available now either as download or as 2 x 12" LP contained in a gate-fold sleeve (limited to 250 copies).
It is not cheap but their bargaining chip is good...
"This is a deluxe run, and a beautiful product to own, even if you don't have a record player... yet." 
Well, at least that is not a problem for me and both have very recently been treated to a new stylus too. It is, as far as I can tell, the first release by Plymouth-based independent label OUF Records.
I hope to hear more music out of Plymouth, in any genre, sooner rather than later. To state it another way - Plymouth has a population broadly similar to the whole of Iceland...

Bella Union is 15 (Part 1) - EOTR 2012

Once upon a time, decades ago and when all was good in the world, there were record labels (remember those things) that you could rely on. I mean that in the sense that if they were on your list of labels to 'like' you could trust that a new release would be at the very least likeable and most possibly lovable even if totally unheard?
Why would one worry about the Iron Curtain, The Cold War or 'mutually assured destruction' when you have a comforting blanket like that?  Or indeed the anti-war artists nibbling at the mainstream... be it in response to events in Malaya, Korea, Vietnam or simply part of a vision of utopia? 
Well, while we haven't reached our panacea yet though the signs are not as poor as some might believe, at least we've got dependable labels back and that is a damn good start.
One of them, Bella Union, is fifteen now and its teenage birthday party was the Friday of End Of The Road Festival 2012 across all four music stages with bands from the Bella Union family. Like all the best parties it started rather early and finished rather late...

Here, on the Garden Stage at around 1pm, is Mountain Man.

Traffic issues, associated with The Dorset Steam Fair apparently, meant they arrived just in the nick of time and without any kit. They borrowed this guitar, that they had never seen before, and promptly nicknamed it 'The Cadillac' - for its white lacquer and shiny chrome fittings...
Suffice it to say that it was not what they would have chosen.

After this start you just knew that it was going to be a remarkable day.

  

Flitting between the various stages at End of The Road is happily very quick and easy to do so off we go to the tented Tipi Stage.  In this case there is a real problem... I didn't take enough pictures but here is one of the only two that I did.

Hannah Cohen, The Tipi Stage @ EOTR 2012.

Another Bella Union artist and her début album 'Child Bride' is quite something. The thing about Bella Union artists, however, is that they are unfailingly good when performing live.
Bella Union does not however just help new artists on the way by releasing their first album... indeed it only signed this one for her second, 'Time Traveller' (2011), although at 22 she is hardly an old-timer. I saw her live at Truck Festival last year, performing with a band, and am now of the opinion that she is better live as a solo artist as here for the band tended to overwhelm the purposefully-fragile beauty of her song-writing and never more so would it be true than of the brand new songs that she essayed last Friday. This really is Alessi in Wonderland and (the prospect of) album #3 is a reason to continue living.
  

Alessi's Ark (Alessi Laurent Marke)  on the Tipi Stage @ 15:05 Friday, August 31.
  

This next artist however, although only recently added to the Bella Union rôster, released his first solo album when I was just a toddler! That, and the next two, have recently been re-released on Bella Union and to go with it he has returned to live touring. He is one of the legendary American songwriters and, as it happens, also a gifted raconteur between those songs.

Van Dyke Parks - Garden Stage @ EOTR 2012, about 17:15 on Friday.

  

This of course just a part of the party and then only those bits of it that, being unable to be in more than one place at a time, I chose to see! Part 2 of that which I saw of the party will follow tomorrow.

Love, loathe, or never even thought about it?

This is just one of the lessons I learned the weekend before last. Those who have opinions have definite ones, many other people are ambivalent to the extent that the concept of folk music means almost nothing at all. It is not for everyone, I know almost nothing at all about classical music although I should. I could find so much to listen to so easily but still I don't. That's just me.
On the subject of folk, which of course I like a great deal, this is a pretty distinct compilation played and sung largely in the contemporary idiom. 

It is also a totally free, and legal, 11-track, 320 mp3 download.

You might not even regard it as folk music at all... and if that is so then that doesn't bother me one bit. If you like it for what it is then that is actually the only thing that matters.  This is the track list:

1. Laura Boyle - Arms Of The Angels
2. Dave Gerard and the Watchmen - Stables
3. Jessie Moncrieff - Georgie
4. Andrew Butler - Love Is A Record
5. Camille Delean - Rivers
6. O. Chapman feat. Faith Barker - Morning Song
7. Lucy Cait - Brother
8. Worry Dolls - Polaroids
9. Woodford Green - What The Doctor Said
10. Josienne Clarke - Forever And More
11. Salwa Azar - White Horse

And, as I was exploring, I thought I might as well also add some artist links (not included in the download).  I certainly haven't had time to explore them in detail yet, but here they are anyway, and a lot of it looks well worth further investigation. 

Woe On the High Street (Part 1.1)

This is merely a continuation of yesterday's ramblings on the state of music retailing. Firstly, thank you those who sent me e-mails on the subject today - they have been read and noted.

I didn't mention independent music retailers (on/off-line) and most of you did! I agree entirely and that is why I focussed on the long established chain-retailers. I suspect that HMV will survive the changes in the medium term and probably return bigger and better - in many ways it is the Marks & Spencer of the music retailing industry and that is an example of a UK retailer that has very successfully pulled itself back together, after a few really rocky years, by a combination of good marketing and re-invention. Nipper is an old dog who needs to learn some new tricks.

HMV can sometimes already be considerably cheaper than Amazon.co.uk, and free delivery is included (it takes a GBP 15 order with amazon.co.uk to qualify).

If I can get the new toy available in "blogger-in-draft" to work then I intend to conduct an entirely anonymous poll to try and find out where my readers buy their music now (by 'now' let's take it to mean 2007 so far).
If that works (and I think the current poll is up and running now) then I'd like to repeat the same survey and, if applicable, ask where you bought your music ten years ago.

If you think I have should have included any other answers, or you want to say anything else about this topic, then please post a comment to this post or e-mail me.

Woe On the High Street (Part 1.0)

I have already mentioned, several times in this blog, the problems that the 'Major Labels' have had and also continue to face. The recent change of ownership of EMI is only the latest in a long line of changes here.
The High Street retail music stores have also been feeling the pressure too - at least in the UK.
Last week HMV announced its profits had halved this year to £50 million. That still sounds a tidy sum, but given it was the return on sales of £2 billion it represents a margin of just 2.5% on sales. For a major High Street retail chain that is a dismal return and it shows just how competitive the market currently is. The smaller chain MVC , and a competitor of HMV, collapsed just before the end of 2006 although 67 of its stores were then acquired by another rival Fopp; a reprieve that has proved short lived as it too went into administration Friday last. It is possible parts of the business might be saved, but it is not clear who might be a buyer.

What has gone wrong?
Not as easy a question as one might expect. It is without doubt a combination of factors, some of which apply far beyond the music/video retailing industry (think travel agents - Thomas Cook announced a raft of store closures this week - and holiday store chains have been merging for several years, etc.)

Here are a list of the problems they face (in no particular order):

• Competition from downloading (legal or otherwise).
• Competition from supermarkets (who discount the current best sellers while not stocking anything else).
• Competition from web-based retailers (Amazon and the rest)
• Out-dated/unappealing retailing space and rapidly rising rentals for new retail space.

Any one would not have been a crisis but the combination of all four is proving near crippling. One thing that links all four factors, as they impact the High Street retailers, can be summed up in a single word - OVERHEADS. High overheads lead to low market competitivness - and that is a fact that it hard to dispute.
Is the current situation the result of an inevitable process with the High Street retailers as mere victims? My answer, given without hesitation, is... NO! NO! NO!

Accuse me of 20/20 hindsight if you like, (I don't work in retail management), but that is actually not a defence option for the afflicted chains: the retail environment is intrinsically fashion-prone and it is all about looking for future trends and therefore involves a high degree of risk-taking.
Had they done that, but somehow missed the mark, I'd have rather more sympathy than I can currently muster. If the retail chains had invested in on-line sales of physical music and of downloads before the market was proven they could have used their then cash-generative businesses to push those "new" markets forward as a logical extension of their existing markets. If they had used their retail advantage, even six years ago, they could have challenged the likes Amazon head-on and it would have made it much more difficult, maybe even impossible, for investor-funded e-businesses to get into the music market in the first place, let alone capture a dominant share of it.
In fact they made no particular concerted attempt to do either. One might well presume that sheer arrogance led them to presume that these developments were simply short-term trendy distractions.
That they failed to take full advantage of on-line sales of physical music might just be regarded as misfortune. That, having missed one huge opportunity, they then also surrendered the next one almost without so much as a whimper, is quite incomprehensible.
'Downloads' came came fairly soon after and to provide them does not require huge investment. The potential was surely obvious and the risk fairly small. That they also missed the opportunity to take the lead with downloads beggars belief: it and could have rescued the situation to a fair degree - so why they didn't latch on to it quicker?

Why has it come to this?
For thirty years, maybe even more, they simply couldn't believe that the gravy-train that they were travelling on would ever hit the buffers. In this way they have fallen into the same trap as the major labels - COMFORT breeds COMPLACENCY.
Complacency has a strange tendency that rather goes against the grain of capitalist greed: young entrepreneurs set things up, and young (or young-at-heart) investors put up the money to do so and both are not risk-averse. If it works out well then, naturally, they get older, richer and more risk-averse as shareholders.
Companies that look solid and risk-averse tend to attract other shareholders of the same persuasion. The senior management they then directly, or indirectly, choose match those ideals and they naturally tend appoint middle management, etc., and from there down employees with new ideas and grand plans either leave for other (probably newer) companies that match their ambition or to set up their own.
That is not necessarily a problem until a large organization is suddenly confronted with a sea-change in its traditional market and competition which, as likely as not will be provided by the sort of companies mentioned above. It is a fair bet that the main rôles in sales and marketing will be run and staffed by people who know exactly the potential weaknesses and strengths of the companies they chose to leave five or even ten years ago.

I'd be very interested to hear anyone's thoughts on this whole topic?

• Have you been/are you an employee in retail music? What do you think?
• Is this just a UK phenomenon? What is the situation in Europe and/or the USA?
• What kind of music stores will there be in 5 or 10 years time?

Or anything else on this subject or the wider implications that is raises. Woe On the High Street (Part 2) will, hopefully, be largely based on your feedback!

Rest assured I'm not going to make any money out of any of this. Google keeps telling my that I should include 'AdSense' on my blog, mentioning the fact that it could earn me money, (10¢/month probably!), but I'm generally inclined against that. If I choose to advertise/promote anything on my blog then I'll be the one who decides what that will be and how and it will be done (and done for free), not least so I can decide exactly where, when and for how long it will appear.
That is my view - do you agree with it?