MusicTank Newsletter - Jan 10

As we finally manage to emerge from the recent deluge of 'Album of the Year' polls, you could be forgiven for believing that the format is in vaguely rude health.  The truth though is that the albums market, in long decline anyway, is starting to look terminal.

The latest figures to have emerged from the BPI press office paint a rather bleak figure with a further decline in album sales of 3.5%, though this reported alongside a decidely more upbeat 32.7% year-on-year increase in single sales (152m up from 115.1m) and 56% rise in digital albums sales.  Sadly though, if there was ever a silver lining to blind you to the existence of the ominously huge dark cloud occupying most of the sky then these rises fit the bill.

Whilst on paper the rise and rise of singles sales from a low in 2003 of 32.3m should be cause for celebration, the harsh truth is that the financials behind the figures make grim reading for music industry executives.  Album sales have only dipped by around 30m in the same time period, but the gulf in revenue earned from albums to singles is so significant that according to The Times, revenue from singles would need to rise by nearly 100 times to make up the difference.

The problem that the music industry now faces is that the usual convenient bogey man, the music pirate, has for once a fairly decent alibi.  Whilst music piracy has no doubt eaten into those album sales over the years, what we're seeing here is the result of a long-held belief by much of the public (and industry too) that albums are simply a waste of money; often three or four good tracks packaged with a load of old rubbish.

Much as the everything-is-available-all-the-time model can propel an 18 year old Rage Against the Machine track to the top of the charts, it also allows the public to pick and choose from an album, cherrypicking the quality whilst wisely steering clear of the filler.

Sadly for the music industry, the albums most likely to find themselves picked apart are also the biggest selling pop releases.  I'm not sure if you've ever sat through an entire Destiny's Child album, but if you ever want to truly experience dissapointment then it's worth putting yourself through it.

Take the band's multi-million selling Survivor, toploaded with the admittedly great singles; the drop-off into simpering mediocre ballad territory is steep and deep enough to give the listener vertigo.  I'd imagine that if you could poll the estimated 13 million people worldwide who handed over £10-15 for the CD if they'd have preferred to spend a fraction of that on a handful of the album's songs there would be a refund queue stretching as far as the eye could see.

When even bands who can string together a set of songs that somehow becomes greater than the sum of its parts, Radiohead for instance, feel little or no need to continue with the album format, then you have to start wondering who in years to come will.

Sadly this is one of those few areas where even the most optimistic blue sky thinking fails to present any clear and easy answers.  The sad truth is that the album, arguably a fairly recent and artificial construct anyway and a good wheeze whilst it lasted, is surely destined for niche status.

As the public becomes increasingly savvy about digital purchasing and the digital retail market continues to grow, this is one trend that looks unstoppable.  The news this week that after prolonged resistance Warners has finally done a deal with eMusic, a site whose subscription/credit-based model positively encourages the user to pick and choose from a wide music buffet, would suggest that even the majors are beginning to look beyond the album.

Editorial by John Power

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OUT & ABOUT: MusicTank events

JOE POX: Mobile apps

INDUSTRY DIARY: Other music industry events

VIEWPOINT: The hidden cost of licensing music in schools

MUSICTANK LOUNGE: University partnership programme & sponsorship

MERRY-GO-ROUND: Industry announcements

WISE MONKEY: whosampledwho.com

Please remember all MusicTank events MUST be booked and paid for in advance!  Become a member of MusicTank for just £30 per year and enjoy privileged discounts on all MusicTank events...

http://www.musictank.co.uk/about/membership-benefits

JAN 19: JAZZ AND THE BEEB: A LOVE SUPREME OR A KIND OF BLUE?

http://www.musictank.co.uk/events/jazz-and-the-beeb-a-love-supreme-of-kind-of-blue

Central to this think tank is the BBC's role in supporting and developing jazz and other niche genre. Should the BBC adopt both a policy and a strategy for the support of its national jazz scene?  With current interest in jazz experiencing a current high, are its pleas for more support from the ‘the nations favourite’ justified?

BBC Radio 3 Controller and Proms Director, Roger Wright and Lewis Carnie, Head of Programmes Radio 2 and 6 Music are the latest speakers to address an audience of journalists, broadcasters, promoters and musicians confirmed for MusicTank’s forthcoming debate.

HAVE YOUR SAY...Whether you’re concerned about the plight of UK jazz’s broadcast profile, have struggled to gain meaningful UK public sector broadcast ocverage for your music, your artist or your gig, or indeed have benefited from BBC air-time and its Charter commitment to helping support and develop UK jazz, this debate affords an unparalleled opportunity to discuss UK Jazz’s public sector broadcasting profile with senior BBC players, Jazz development organisation, Jazz Services and leading academics.

All delegates will receive a FREE hard copy of Jazz Service's Report, 'The BBC - Public Sector Broadcasting, Jazz, Policy and Structure in The Digital Age', launching at this event and which forms the focus of this debate.  Currently undergoing a final edit, a second report 'The Economic Value Of Jazz - pt II' will be introduced, with copies also available, free of charge, post-event. 

And as if that's not enough, not only will you get a free post-event transcript, but thanks to leading DAB radio handset manufacturer Roberts, all event-bookers will be automatically entered into a free prize draw to win one of three 1950's retro 'Revival' DAB handsets!  The draw will take place during the event and is open to all event bookers.

SPEAKERS: Keynote - Prof. Stuart Nicholson - Author, Lecturer and Journalist

Panellists - Lewis Carnie (Head of Programmes, BBC Radio 2 & 6 Music); Chris Hodgkins (Director, Jazz Services & Musician); Mykaell Riley (Head Music Production & Director, Centre for Black Music Research  University of Westminster); Roger Wright (Controller, BBC Radio 3 & Director, BBC Proms).

Chairman - Keith Harris - MusicTank/Keith Harris Music Ltd /Director, Performer Affairs, PPL

DIARY - Date & Time: 19 Jan '10 | 18.30 - 21.00hrs; Venue: The Cockpit Theatre, Gateforth Street, Marylebone, London, NW8 8EH

Cost: £25 MusicTank Members | £30 Trade Body | £35 Full Price - price includes two reports, complimentary drink on arrival, free post-event transcript AND free entry into a Roberts DAB Radio handset draw.

Full details & booking: http://www.musictank.co.uk/events/jazz-and-the-beeb-a-love-supreme-of-kind-of-blue

All tickets MUST be booked and paid-for in advance - no walk-up on the day!

FEB 25: CHARTS AND THE RELEASE PROCESS

If there was one thing particularly notable about last year’s unparalleled battle for the Christmas number one spot, it was that it gave the Official Charts more prominence than they have had in a long time.  The past decade has arguably been a bumpy ride for the Singles Chart, with the singles market struggling through the early years of the decade and the average weekly sales for a number one dipping to an all time low in 2007.

However, massive recent growth in the download market has seen that corner turned, while digital retail has also put some previously unknown democracy into the Official Chart – driven by fan power, we are beginning to see tracks enter the Top 40 of their own accord, off the back of adverts, TV shows such as this year’s Glee and even fan campaigns…Here’s To You Mrs (Iris) Robinson?

But, of course, it is a long time since the days when singles were released and worked their way up the charts on the back of word of mouth and reviews – intriguingly, these are conditions which still prevail in many other European countries, in markets where charts have always traditionally been less important from a cultural standpoint.  So what is different about the UK?

Next month’s MusicTank will consider the pressures on the release process, in an age where a track is generally 'available' as soon as the first promos have been sent out.  MusicTank will ask how labels should market and promote their releases in a post-digital age and whether it is possible or even desirable for the media and music businesses to wean each other off their addiction to release dates.

To help find the solution, MusicTank will be undergoing a change itself and will be presented in a new format, where we will attempt to crowdsource the answers.  Following the keynote presentation, attendees will be split into groups, each led by one of the panellists, in order to develop their own ideas before presenting them back to the wider group; MusicTank 2.0 you could say…

Speaker announcements due shortly.  Details and booking... http://www.musictank.co.uk/events/charts-and-the-release-process

Interested in event association?  MusicTank welcomes appropriate event sponsorship enquiries, for which a rate card is now available.  Please contact jonathan@musictank.co.uk

Have you got an iPhone?  Have you downloaded an 'app'?  Have you then shown it to someone and screamed in their face about how amazing it is?  Well, you’re just one crumb among 3bn that goes to make up a giant Loaf Of Idiot.  Yes, Apple has 'delivered' (that’s 'delivered', not 'sold') over 3bn of them now.  Great.  The little flecks of digital spit are now be hailed as 'the future' for music because you can, you know, have music on them and they can tell you all about the terrible bands you like.  Brilliant.  Well done.

So, what have they done for music?  Allowed a game like Tap Tap Revenge to be to Guitar Hero what a pebble is to gold.  And Snow Patrol have now released two different apps – giving us two more reasons to hate them.  Like little digital puppies, these are things that are downloaded, used once and then left unattended to get squashed under the wheels of our apathy.  What they are doing is training us that music is not even worth concentrating on or going back to more than once.  So rather than saving music, they’re turning music into an one-legged boomerang that we throw and know will never come back to us.   Still, there’s two different Snow Patrol ones to increase your apathy twofold.

MPA, MMF & MMF TRAINING: PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME IN MUSIC PUBLISHING

The Music Publishers Association and Music Managers Forum in association with MMF Training are pleased to announce that their joint Professional Development Programme in Music Publishing will run again in 2010.  This Programme has been developed and refined over time to ensure that all attendees become better equipped to take advantage of the new business opportunities that are central to the development of our industry.  Individuals from all sectors of the music industry who are involved or interested in any aspect of music publishing will benefit from the Programme’s varied and comprehensive content. The objective is straightforward: to provide practical information placed in the context of today’s music industry.

DIARY - First module: Monday 15 February 2010 at 6.30pm

COST PER MODULE - MPA/MMF members & PRS Music Staff: £29.79 | AIM, APRS, BASCA, BPI, IAMA, MPG & MU members: £46.81 |Non-members: £63.83

All prices subject to VAT @ 17.5%.

Module 1: Monday 15 February 2010
Music Publishing, Rights Ownership & Usage

Module 2: Monday 15 March 2010
Creator / Publisher Relationships, Agreements & Contracts

Module 3: Monday 19 April 2010
Sub-Publishing, Co-Publishing, Publisher/Publisher Relationships, Contracts and International Royalty Tracking

Module 4: Monday 17 May 2010
Music Publishing in Audio-Visual Media: Rights Holders, Owners and Music Users

Module 5: Monday 7 June 2010
Music Publishing, The Record Business & Live Performance

Module 6: Monday 5 July 2010
International Collecting Societies & Global Royalty Streams 

More... http://www.mpaonline.org.uk/Events/MPAMMF_Professional_Development_Programme_2009.html

MPA INDUCTION COURSE FOR NEWCOMERS TO MUSIC PUBLISHING

The MPA Induction Course acts as an essential overview of the music publishing business, its organisations and their roles. Each session is conducted by an expert in the field.

Sessions include:

The Many Facets of Music Publishing | Publishing Agreements and Money | The Writer’s Perspective | Copyright & Related Rights | Print Music Publishing | The Work of the Collecting Societies - PRS & MCPS | The Users’ Perspective | The Work of the MPA | The Work of UK Music |

DIARY: Tues 2 Feb, 09.30 - 17.00 hrs & Wed 3 Feb 09.30 - 12.30 hrs | COST: £135.00+VAT (£158.63) for MPA members and MCPS / PRS staff | £185.00+VAT (£217.38) for members of AIM, BASCA, BPI, MMF & MPG | All others £215.00 + VAT (£252.63)

More… http://www.mpaonline.org.uk/Events/MPA_Induction_Course_for_Newcomers_to_Music_Publishing1.html

MARCH 4: MUSIC 4.5 CONFERENCE

2Pears, the team that bring you the popular TechCrunch Europe events and the UKTI Pitch Workshops, are pleased to announce the launch of a new music tech start-up event - Music 4.5 - which will take place in central London on Thursday, March 4, 2010.

Music 4.5 will bring together music tech start-ups, serial entrepreneurs, investors, artists, band managers and key industry players to share knowledge, discuss strategies for business success, debate market trends and evolution, as well as network.

MusicTank newsletter subscribers can get 20% off the delegate rate using the following code when booking: JGR10

More... http://www.music4point5.com

On 31st December 2009, the DCMS finally published details of the consultation to amend the Licensing Act 2003 and exempt some small-scale live music events from licensing.  Strangely, the government’s proposals make no mention of exempting music performances in schools, and missing from the DCMS’s list of consultees are the NUT, the NAHT, the Independent Schools Association and the National Confederation of PTA’s. 

Under the Licensing Act, schools staging musical events in front of an audience are exempt from paying the premises licence fee, but they are not exempt from paying for Temporary Event Notices (and this will cost £252 p.a. if the school takes up its annual entitlement of 12), nor are schools exempt from the requirement and cost of advertising the licence application in the press for a period of 28 days. 

But that is only the beginning of what the CEO of the Independent Schools Association described as ‘a burdensome bureaucratic nightmare’.  When attending licensing hearings, schools expecting that educational needs will allow an application to proceed unopposed might be in for a nasty surprise.  LACORS guidelines for Licensing Committee Hearings advise that cultural considerations ‘will always be subservient to the Licensing Objectives’.  Accordingly some Licensing Authorities have implemented wholly unnecessary and prohibitive restrictions.  Conditions placed on the premises licence of Verulum School in St Albans run to over 1,400 words – and include conditions such as ‘neighbours are made aware by letters of the type of event and the time the music will stop’ ‘There are to be no more than thirty events per year at the school.  There are to be no more than five events in any one month’.

Even a conservative estimate of the amount schools have spent on music licensing is likely to be embarrassing for the government, and all of the live music statistical reports issued by the DCMS have carefully avoided any reference to how the Act has affected schools and colleges. 

Since Nov 2005, if the 24,000+ schools in England and Wales have each spent £1,000 on music licensing and advertising this would have amounted to over £24m.  According to the DCMS, the National Confederation of PTA’s could account for up to half of the 360,000+ Temporary Event Notices issued in the three years to March 2009.  DCMS statisticians have not asked Licensing Authorities how many of these TENs included permission for live music, but the total cost of these licences is over £7.5m. 

The DCMS recently attempted a rather feeble justification for this fiasco:  'If there was no restriction on entertainment events at schools, independent schools could simply operate as venues.'  Ronnie Bridgett DCMS Spokesman, 8 Sep 2009. 

This begs the question: should the Licensing Act be amended to cover pet animals just in case schools simply operate as zoos? 

Lord Clement-Jones’s Live Music bill, which contains a proposal to exempt school music from licensing is due to receive it’s 2nd reading in the House of Lords on 15th January 2010. 

Sources:

LACORS Guidelines: http://cmis.milton-keynes.gov.uk/CmisWebPublic/Binary.ashx?Document=14268

St Albans Licence Register: http://licensing.stalbans.gov.uk/MVM/Online/EGov/License_Registers/Registers_Criteria.aspx

MUSICTANK'S UNIVERSITY PARTNERSHIP PROGRAMME

MusicTank is pleased to announce the launch of its University Partnership Programme that's been established with the aim of bringing UK music business closer to all universities with relevance reaching beyond those teaching or studying core music subjects.  Media, law, computer science, technology and business courses potentially have much to gain from engagement with MusicTank, too.

It is our intention that this initiative will become an important component of MusicTank’s longer-term mission: to improve access to music industry knowledge for all in further and higher education, irrespective of status.

The University Partnership Programme is designed to provide its member organisations with secure, privileged access to relevant music industry information and valuable resources, as well as providing advanced and exclusive access to MusicTank’s own content pool, research outputs and event outcomes and discounts for all MusicTank events.  Institutional membership also provides a unique opportunity to become a partner in MusicTank's work, too.

Interested? For information and pricing, please contact mailto:jennt.tyler@musictank.co.uk

SPONSORSHIP

MusicTank has had to take a long hard look at ways of becoming self-sustaining and after careful consideration has decided to open itself up to commercial opportunities that include sponsorship.

"What of your much-lauded independence?" you might cry...Well, our neutrality isn't up for sale and we are committed to maintaining it, central as it is to our reputation and continued success. Opening ourselves up to additional revenue streams will allow us to continue to do what we do best - engage with and inform industry in these rapidly changing and challenging times.  To be clear - sponsorship will not be allowed to influence our editorial or direction, nor will it influence panellist selection or content.

Commercial partners are sought for our think tank events with a range of packages available, to suit all budgets - we're also inviting sponsorship enquries for our newsletter, too.

If you or your company are interested in helping sustain the network in this way we'd be pleased to hear from you, in which case, please contact mailto:jenny.tyler@musictank.co.uk

MUSICTANK POSTS & TWITTERS

MusicTank has a facebook Group and a Twitter feed.  Visit us at:

   http://is.gd/mwBa/musictank/facebookgroup

   http://twitter.com/MusicTank

National Music Council - New Chair Announced

Sarah Faulder (Sound and Music) was recently elected as Chair of the NMC, replacing Robin Osterley, who stepped down after serving in this role for 9 years.  Sarah Faulder’s most recent role was Public Affairs Director for PRS for Music, where she was able to apply her extensive legal and music industry knowledge and experience, both in Brussels and Whitehall, in furthering the interests of composers and songwriters. 

Music Managers' Guide To The Galaxy - Help Sought!

The Artist Managers' Guide To The Galaxy is a joint international project, between University of Westminster (London) and PopAkademie Baden-Wurttemberg (Germany) within the scope of the European Student Exchange Programme, Mu:Zone. The project is being realised by two German students during an exchange semester at University of Westminster.

The project aims to develop a central information platform for artists/bands and their managers, in the form of an online blog in which relevant news and events will be filtered and discussed.  Additionally, expert statements and interviews on the ongoing changes and developments in the music industry will be published.

The essence of the project is to support and encourage inter-European exchange within the music industry and to provide access to insider information across EU member countries, achieved through the selection of topics that are of international interest as well as fielding Europe-wide music industry experts and executives for incisive comment, views and opinions.

On completion, it is planned that a co-operation of international music business students will continue to run the blog.

The projects founders need your help!  They are keen to hear from any industry personnel who may be interested in helping develop this project.  They are also looking for volunteers willing to write for the blog and for input from established industry players, particularly artist/band managers.

Please contact Alexander von Harsdorf mailto:alexander.von-harsdorf@stud.popakademie.de

whosampledwho.com

"Exploring and discussing the DNA of music" is this site's one-liner, that aims to be the most comprehensive, detailed and accurate database of samples and covers on the web; the object being to unpick the patchwork of samples that are the key ingredient of much of today's chart music. 

Built by its users, this site's content already spans some 20'000 songs and 9'000 artists which is searchable by genre, artist and year, with tracks linked to YouTube videos telling you where the sample appears.  Anyone can submit information about a sample or a cover and subject to approval it will be published on the site, ready to be discussed by the world.

More... http://www.whosampledwho.com

If you have any queries regarding any of our events or activities, please call Jonathan on 020 7915 5412, or e-mail: info@musictank.co.uk

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily condoned or shared by MusicTank. MusicTank is a non-profit organisation owned and operated by University of Westminster. University of Westminster is a charity and a company limited by guarantee. Reg Number: 977818, England. Registered Office: 309 Regent Street, London, W1. MusicTank is based at University of Westminster, Fifth Floor, Copland Building, 115 New Cavendish Street, London, W1W 6UW.