A blog about Australian music, marketing and social media

For a triple j mag feature story published earlier in the year - entitled ‘Music Counts For Something’; full article here - I interviewed a handful of Australian independent musicians to discuss the financial realities of pursuing their passion.

Besides hip-hop artist Urthboy - full interview here - I also phone-interviewed Julian Hamilton of Sydney electronic duo The Presets [pictured right], whose ARIA Award-winning 2008 album Apocalypso is one of the highest selling Australian records of this decade.

Our conversation involves discussing music and money. Specifically - what proportion of musicians’ income consists of music sales?

Andrew: I know you weren’t too keen to discuss income specifics, so let’s talk about percentages. Is that okay?

Julian: Of course. You can ask me whatever you like, but I obviously can’t give you direct figures. I guess it’s very hard, it’s a bit awkward talking about specifics about what I earn personally, but it’s also tricky because the way that musicians earn money is so varied and so many different revenue streams, coming at different times. One month you might make no money. Another month you might make hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, based on just what’s happened possibly six months ago or a year ago. It’s kind of tricky to put a specific on a weekly wage.

Outside of an album cycle - which The Presets are right now, since you’re not touring, and album sales are ongoing, based on public interest - could you put a percentage figure on what your monthly income would be, purely from music sales?

It would be very hard. It’s strange because the way that albums kind of sell, you’ll often see money coming in way down the track. If someone buys a record in February, you might not see the money from that album sale until February the next year, just because it takes so long for the money to sort of go from the distributor to the record company, and the record company to the band company, and then for our accountant to finally get our hands on it after the taxes and all that stuff. It takes a very, very long time.

A lot of people might think that when you see a band and they’re touring and their album kind of blows up and goes number one, it doesn’t mean the next week someone gets the cash in their account for another year. Even though – it’s funny, I guess we’d still be sort of making money now from record sales from when we were selling heaps of them, when it was kind of big last year. Then of course, overseas sales take even longer to come through and it’s very tricky to pin down particular figures from particular times.

I’ve had this conversation with a few artists, and they’ve said much the same thing. I understand that.

Back in the old days, with older bands when we were just playing, we’d buy a box of 50 CDs off our record company and then we’d sell them on the road, at the end of the show we’d sell 12 CDs or something and they’d go “great, we’ve got $120” or whatever we were selling them for, that very night. But things have certainly changed a lot since then because there are so many different levels. The money sort of flows through until Kim and I get our hands on it.

It’s more complicated now, I suppose.

As you get bigger and bigger, it gets more complicated.

I should give you a bit more background info on where I’m coming from with this story. The idea came to me because I get this feeling that, as you mentioned, when people see that you’re getting played on triple j, or that your album’s number one, that immediately translates into ‘you’re rich’ or ‘you’ve made it’, when for many bands, that’s not the case.

That’s right. Make no mistake, if you’re getting huge airplay, you do become rich, but just not the very next week. It does happen eventually. If a band is clever and is not being ripped off by people and if the band writes their own material, which we do and I guess a lot of bands that get played on triple j would, and if they’re getting a shit load of airplay, then they do get paid and they get paid well for it. I guess it takes a very long time to get to that position.

What percentage of The Presets’ overall income would be derived from music sales?

Not the largest percentage, because probably the most money that we would make would be from writing the songs and what is referred to as publishing. If you write a song, the readers might know this or might not know this, but if you write a song, every time that song gets played on the radio you get paid a few cents. Every time it gets played on TV, every time it gets played at a club, or every time you perform it on stage at a festival, APRA - which is a body in Australia then collect royalties on your behalf – you get paid as the writer. That would be the main way that we make money as musicians, as The Presets, has been the writing of the songs, as being the copyright holders of the writing. After that, I’d guess we probably make more money from touring, and then after that is probably record sales.

So if you were to guess a percentage, what would that be?

It’d probably be around a third or quarter, off the top of my head. You might find it the same with a lot of bands. There’s not much in money to be made just in record sales. These days, if you want to be a working musician can’t just rely on record sales to make money. You need to start looking at other things, like trying to get your music played on television shows or trying to put on a good tour and put on good shows, performances that people want to come to. Or try to design some cool t-shirts and sell at shows. There are heaps of other ways to make a living out of being in a band than just selling CDs.

And it does depend on what kind of artist you are. I spoke to Gotye for this, and he mentioned his income would be about 70% because he doesn’t tour that often and that’s where most of his money comes from. But he tours with The Basics as well, and he said 15% probably comes from album sales and the rest is from touring and publishing.

Yeah, that’s right. That’s why these days you might find record companies where they do deals with bands that are really interested in doing deals that include merchandise, t-shirts and stuff, and also touring because record companies have caught onto this that while bands don’t see that much profit from selling CDs, they might make $2.00 or $3.00 off of every CD sold; meanwhile bands can make much more money going on the road and doing touring or like I said, they’ll sell a t-shirt for maybe $40.00 and they’ll make $30.00 profit from it. The record companies are now doing deals where they not only get a cut from the record, they also get it from merchandise sales and touring sales and all that kind of stuff.

You’re referring to 360 deals, as they’re called?

Yeah, are you going to be talking about that in the story?

No, that’s probably too much information for the small amount of space that I’ve got. That percentage you mentioned - a quarter, or a third of your income - did that align with your expectations when you first became a musician?

Yeah it did. I guess Kim and I have both been working as musicians for a long time and we realised long ago that if you’re really serious about making music, making a living from it, it was about writing songs and copyright, holding a copyright as a writer. So we knew that. Record sales are not really the place to make money first, except for the writing. In that respect yeah, it’s definitely what I expected. Most of the money we make is from writing, not really from sales. But, don’t get me wrong, bands that sell half a million CDs make money from selling CDs.

Do you think people are more likely to buy music in 2010, or less likely?

I think just as likely as in other times. I guess I wouldn’t know. I know that these days kids listen to music in different ways; they don’t rush out and buy CDs anymore. They’re just as happy to jump onto a band’s MySpace and listen to a song, or watch it on YouTube. They don’t really need to own the CD anymore. That being said, we’ve sold hundreds of thousands of CDs so people must still be buying CDs. I’m sure there’s hundreds of thousands more that are out there that are just happy to listen to it for free on a website, which is fine.

Do you think it’s about offering the consumer more value to try to convince them to buy it instead of just stream it, or listen to it on YouTube, like you mentioned?

I’m not sure how much more value we can add, apart from making a really great record. I think that’s one of the main things; I think with the way that downloads and all that stuff is going on, that might be hurting artists who just have one or two really catchy singles and then the rest of their album’s really crap. But I think a lot of bands - like Gotye, and hopefully us - actually make great records. Or try and make whole records. I think that’s good value. I think the answer is to try to put out a really good product, make a really quality album, not just a couple of great singles and a dodgy record.

Cool. I’m out of questions. Did you want to talk about anything else around this issue?

Since young musicians would be really interested in this article, I would really encourage them to make sure that they’re signed up to APRA because they’re a really great organisation that look after musicians and collect royalties for them. Even if they’re just starting out like we were 15 years ago, we were members of APRA and they collected royalties for us and it might have been a little $5.00 cheque once a month, but still it was something and it made us feel like we were real musicians. I would definitely encourage kids out there to sign up with those guys.

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Thanks for your time, Julian. For more on this topic, read the article that appeared in triple j mag, or read my interview with Australian hip-hop artist Urthboy on the same topic.

For more of The Presets, visit their website. The music video for their track ‘If I Know You‘ is embedded below.

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For a triple j mag feature story published earlier in the year - entitled ‘Music Counts For Something’; full article here - I interviewed a handful of Australian independent musicians to discuss the financial realities of pursuing their passion.

One such interviewee was Australian hip-hop artist Urthboy (a.k.a. Tim Levinson, pictured right), who also performs as part of The Herd and is manager of the Elefant Traks record label. Since he’s deeply involved in both the art and business sides of music, he was well-placed to comment for the story.

Upstairs at the Brisbane venue The Step Inn on April 30 2010 before his headline performance later that night, I asked him some questions - alongside my girlfriend Rachael, and a couple of Heinekens from Urthy’s rider - for the triple j mag story. Our full conversation is below.

Andrew: I feel that musicians are glorified in society, more than they ever have been. Everyone looks up to them as kind of an escape from the drudgery; “Hell yeah, I’d love to be a musician. I’d love to be touring and selling records.” But I have a feeling that the realities associated with that, especially in an economic sense, don’t add up to what most people would expect.

Tim: I think for young people, musicians are people you look up to, and you admire. I think for people who have a sense of responsibility and careers and whatnot, they don’t have that same perception, you know; musicians often have a reputation for being slack and lazy and you know, irresponsible. But that’s beside the point.

It’s a great common conversation between musicians and it’s something which is very difficult to reconcile, and that is the perception of status that is attached to radio play and touring and performing at festivals. It’s very difficult to reconcile the perception of where you’re at with where you know you’re at, for sure.

And then it’s across the board, musicians have this – it’s a cliché for musicians to have that conversation, just seeing old friends, schoolmates, people who – for the amount of times over the years where we’ve heard the phrase, “Well done, you’re one of the only people that went through and made it from my school”. And in my school, like more than half of the year failed their TER (Tertiary Entrance Rank), which was the final sort of test in year 12. So we were coming from a school that didn’t do very well.

So whenever I go back home, without fail, [someone says] “You’ve made it. Thank God one of us got through.” I sort of sit there and go, [sighs] “Ah, fuck if I had your security, even with the job that you’re not happy with.” It’s a difficult one. A lot of musicians would swap that in a heartbeat.

That infographic I sent you [pictured left; click for larger version] was comparing how many recorded products musicians need to sell to meet [American] minimum wage. I’m looking to frame that in terms of Australian artists. As label head, as well as performer with The Herd, and as well as a solo artist, I think you’re pretty well placed to have an accurate understanding of how tough that can be.

Yeah. (laughs) That whole idea of getting paid – look, honestly; we’re coming to an era where, as an artist, you’re expected to be thankful that someone has taken the time to rip you off.

Is it an attention thing?

Yeah - because they’ve paid attention. So, if you’re condemning the very people that are taking music for free and downloading it and sharing it, and they’re the people that you’re begging to actually be heard, to actually hear you because as an artist, there’s nothing greater than being heard. If people would take the time to actually listen to what you’re saying, that’s a great privilege but it’s gone so twisted now that you somehow are supposed to feel appreciative of it. And yeah, you do, but it’s a very… it’s a conflicted state of mind.

But you can never piece together anything resembling an income without including some sort of regular or fall back job. You can never hope to get any income off streamed music, and when we ever get our spreadsheets, which break down all of our sales, it does actually have our digital income. The physical is very simple. It’s very old school. It’s just a CD is sold, and you get the money for that CD.

Digital is crazy. You get all the streamed as well, so what Elefant Traks gets, from a label point of view, is a 3,000 line spreadsheet from our distributor. It lists all of your songs, and it’ll have income from iTunes America, iTunes UK, Bigpond, all these different parts, and all of these different spots will put little $1.23s and $5.36s. The streams will be like 3,000 streams of your song, and you got $0.39 for it or something.

Those payments come through quarterly, and you’ll have a certain sum and hopefully, if you’ve broken even and gone into a profit, then you get x amount of dollars. Maybe if you’re lucky, that’s a couple of thousand dollars from that record. That’s not very common. Any time that comes up, that’s a little chunk of money that comes. It’s like a bonus, if you earn a normal income. That turns into like, $50 a week, or $50 a fortnight.

Then you hope to put some gigs together and work to the point where you’re actually getting a decent guaranteed fee, but then you break down that guaranteed fee and because you’ve worked your way up to that point, you can’t actually play too much because you can’t keep getting those fees, so then you break down those fees, and they reduce right down.

So yeah, the challenges are pretty high. When regular punters look at artists and go, “Wow, look at that billing [on the line-up]”, and “we paid $80 to go see this festival, $100 to see this festival, yeah; these guys are on the gravy train,”…actually, it never works out that way.

It’s tricky for me to even go into the complexities of it. When you do have a little bit of success and people are buying your record, you operate on all these different lump sums of money that come in. If they came in every week it’d be great, but they come in every three months or every now and again, and you start cutting it down to being “Okay, I’ve earned this much money of the course of 6 months. If I broke that down into 26 weeks, I’ve just earned $133.75 a week. Yeah, awesome!” $133.75 a week is pretty modest. [editor's note: this is a nominal fee that Tim picked out of the air; it's not to be taken as fact]

You’re including in that fee the album sales, touring, merch, all that stuff, or is it just album sales?

It’s a number I plucked out of my head, but quite often that flashpoint… Essentially, the public is going to hear from you on the radio and they’re going to see your name in lights a couple of times. Then they go on to their own normal thing, so it’s natural that you would look at those things as being indicators of success. The reality’s far different. It’s difficult for me to even go into – I can’t break down exactly – I think I need you to be a bit more specific for me to breakdown some more detailed points of where an artist will get their income.

This article is talking about recorded music, so CD sales, digital sales, or streaming. For example, what percentage of your income as an artist would come from the sale of your music, not touring, not merch, just the sale of the music itself?

It’s so small; it’s almost not worth talking about. It presents a picture. I reckon if I plucked a figure out of my head, just a ballpark percentage, it’d probably be, of my overall income, 5-10%.

So does that mean that you believe the consumer views an artist’s recorded product as an advertisement to go and see the show, to buy a shirt? If so, that’d be a shift in mindset from buying CDs to show your support, to hearing music somehow and going to the show, thereby giving you a bit of income through ticket sales to the show itself.

Yeah, for sure. It’s like professional sport in a way. That’s giving it far too generous an analogy, but once you do crack through a certain point and start selling a lot of records, the figure changes somewhat. It depends on whether your live show is strong. That’s why you can never have a general rule. It’s partly why I looked at that graph and was like, “It doesn’t really apply to me, but I can get parts of it.” Every act is different. Some people have a really strong live show, and therefore that’s going to reflect in the ratio of their income.

But, for the most part, until you get to a certain point, you’re really seeing crumbs from your recorded sales because you’ve got so many costs that go into them. So yeah, you do hope to kind of establish some sort of live presence so that you’re able to earn some sort of regular income from the live performance. Once you get above a certain level, then record sales are real serious money and they’re regular. And going hand-in-hand with those record sales is [that] you don’t live in a vacuum. Those record sales are a result of a lot of radio play. So that radio play doesn’t quite come off the back of nothing, but you don’t have to physically go to work to get the royalties from the radio play. So that radio play will come in twice annually, through APRA, through those collection agencies. And you might see $20,000 or $30-40,000 if you’re one of the biggest artists getting played. So it’s all relative.

The Herd [pictured left] is one of the biggest hip hop acts in the country. Is that a fair statement?

At one point.

Not so much anymore?

Well, peoples’ memories are quite short, so there is a necessity for a constant presence and a relentless pursuit of participation in the music scene. If you do have that then you maintain a position. If not, then you have to work your way back up. So The Herd haven’t really done anything since early 2009, and the result of that is that you… It’s hard to say. It’s constantly changing. We’ve never reached those same heights as say, The [Hilltop] Hoods, or recently, Bliss N Eso.

Are you saying that your experience as a solo artist and as part of The Herd are similar, in terms of what we’re talking about here, the CD sales and digital sales?

Yeah, for sure, with The Herd and with the solo thing – I can’t be ‘the victim’ here. We’ve had an extraordinary run in many ways, and have been able to experience a bit of that success, and so with that, increased royalties. And when you put together a catalogue of music, then you find that just keeps feeding. A lot of musicians will say to you that these little songs become like little children; they grow up, and you get old and decrepit, and they take care of you. That’s hopefully the way that it works. Songs are like that. They live, and they breathe, and they give back to you, but you’re lucky if you come across some of those songs because they don’t come that often, like bad children.

But we’ve had some decent sales over the years and we’re independent, so when that graph said you’ve got to sell 1,800 copies of your record every quarter or whatever it was, or week or something - I can’t remember exactly - that’s completely wrong. It doesn’t apply to us. It might apply in America, where there’s such a bigger population, that’s where that graph is wonky and it’s all relative.

We would never have to sell anything close to that to make some sort of regular income. In fact, if we sold that many per week, we would all be buying houses, partly because of the infrastructure in place being independent. If we were selling that many – we don’t have those overheads that mean that 1,800 [albums] pays for multiple staff, pays for all these different promotional costs, the logistics of all the staff, all the extra hangers-on, the additional recording costs. All those costs that all just one-by-one are things that are in place to make something work, but you add them up and all of a sudden you’ve spent $400,000, therefore needing to sell that many per month, and the record label is paying for all those costs so they’re saying “Because we’re taking the risk, it’s a business principle, we’ll take [a certain percentage] more money.” The artist, at the very bottom of the rung, is getting their money at the very end, and it’s a small percentage of each CD sale.

Independently, our percentage is so much higher. And the Elefant Traks was never set up to be purely about the business. We’ve always been creative people and it has facilitated our creative needs. Now we have to be a business and be careful about that stuff, and we’re not like a charity. But at the same time, we set up our deals so that they are quite artist-friendly, because we want to treat our artists like we want to be treated ourselves.

The other artists I’m speaking to for this story are all independents, which may skew the results somewhat.

It will skew the results.

I think it would be hard to find a major label-signed artist who is willing to talk about this because they’re beholden to so many other external factors.

‘Don’t upset the apple cart.’ I think that you kinda need it, honestly. Because the funny thing is that it’s sometimes smoke and mirrors. I remember going on the [SBS TV] Insight program and talking about downloading. I was sitting next to Phrase and Jimmy Barnes’ daughter, and there were kids in the audience saying that they were happy to download Phrase’s material because he was with Universal. And I knew for a fact that Phrase wasn’t selling jack. And we were selling a lot more, so the moral question was so blurred, that these kids were thinking they’re doing the right thing by ripping off a big label, and in some ways they’re right on the money because the labels just write that shit off. They write off a million dollars, they can write off a hundred thousand, easy. But it’s smoke and mirrors because sometimes the major artists are doing a lot worse; when it comes down to it, all they’re benefiting from is like an exaggerated sense of that status that we’ve been talking about.

What this story comes down to is giving triple j mag readers who might be musicians or aspiring musicians a kind of commercial reality as to what they can expect, in terms of making an income from their art. And you’ve been doing it 15 years, maybe more? Would you like to comment on the commercial realities of being a musician?

I think that if you’re a musician and you’re instinctively passionate about it, you have no choice. You are compelled to do it. But, there’s definitely a need to have a sense of the reality of the situation and that is that you will need to get a part-time job in order to sustain yourself. And that’s good. That’s cool. I mean, in an ideal world we’d have all these artists who were so appreciated that they are put on a pedestal and allowed to just do their art. But there’s never been any research that has concluded that an artist is going to create their best art when they’re just 100% focused on it. You know, if anything it’s often the opposite. It’s the art that is created out of great hardship. It’s art that is created out of just a necessity to express yourself because maybe you are completely oppressed. And that’s a great thing.

So, it’s an ideal situation to be in, to just knuckle down and work on art, but I’ve watched so many of our young artists and people I’m involved with let everything slide because they’re just focus-less. They don’t have something that grounds them. They decide that they want to be an artist and then they just don’t do anything, yet there’s other people that have their 9-to-5 [jobs] and are so passionate about it, that they find time between 5 and 9, and then furthermore into the night. There’s that drive. So, you definitely sort out the stayers and the pretenders after they do get a sense of “Wow, we went on tour and lost 20 grand. We were supposed to be famous now.”

‘You’ve made it!’ because you’re touring, and yet what’s in your wallet is not comparable.

It’s funny because these stories, they are meant to drive home” just how hard being an artist is”, and “don’t delude yourself”. And you think about it, and you weigh it up, and you get a little bit depressed about it, and it doesn’t match your expectations of what you thought it would be. And you come back full circle, and still do it because you have to.

Rachael: This is a bit off topic. Do you think there should be some sort of government funding or program for new bands to be funded for?

I don’t ever believe that funding should go to new bands who haven’t already worked a little bit and found their own way through. Because it’s like that welfare mentality, where there’s a sense of expectation of how you’re supposed to be treated. It’s so much better in the long run, to get a sense of the nuts and bolts of what you’re doing, than to wait for a leg-up because you’re in such a better position once you finally do have a bit of momentum.

And, those grants, they’re always skewed a little bit to conventional forms of art; so often it becomes orchestral groups and jazz and all these different sort of forms of art, which are really agreeable. You can’t, as a rule, get money to people who are going to do really exciting and original things because those people are usually not familiar with the processes of grant applications, and the words you’ve got to use to be able to succeed in getting your grant. So you find, a lot of the time, people who are successful in grant applications are people who’ve done it before and know the game.

There’s these kids who could possibly tell the greatest story and tell some really amazing inner-city or outer-country story. It could be something that is so beautiful or just real, and they don’t know about the ways of getting money from the government. They are just people who have this little fucking gremlin in their brain that goes, “You should come up with these words and these melodies that make peoples’ hair on the back of their neck stand up.”

I’ve had experience with grant applications. We went for one very early on with The Herd. We put so much time in and spent so much on the logistics, and just got shut down. We were like “Fuck this, never going for a grant again,” and it was five years until we went for another one. And I was really happy about it because it just meant we relied on ourselves. We never grew faster than what we could handle. We were never one of those bands that ever had a hit. We were more surprised by things going better than what we thought they would, and then when we came back around to it, we’d proved ourselves over and over again, and we got the grant. We were in a much better position to take advantage of it.

I don’t really care for government grants. I think they’re so important. I would never dismiss them. They’re crucial for any art scene, but as far as relying on them as a young band, jeez, I reckon that’s a sign of a problem more than the fact that you don’t get [a grant] being a problem. You should be relying on your own sense of imagination. I believe that art always survives in the most grimy areas, anyway. Those flowers’ll creep through the pavement. It doesn’t matter if you get an injection of funds.

Cool, man. I’m out of questions.

I don’t even know if I answered those. All those statistics, they’re probably something. If you put together your story and you want a little bit more concrete details on that level, I’ll be happy to actually go through and work out some chart that is a bit more relevant to Elefant Traks and our artists. That’ll be fine, but as far as speaking off the top, I didn’t come prepared.

That’s fine. I spoke to Gareth [Liddiard] from The Drones [pictured left] a couple of weeks ago. He was talking on this topic about how artists are revered in society, like “Oh, you’re an artist, you’re a musician, that’s awesome.” But he spoke of the reality of that which is that he makes a bit more than what he would if he was on Centrelink, unemployed.

That’s about right.

That graph I showed you spoke of minimum wage, but to give it in an Australian perspective, I guess it would be in terms of a Centrelink, or a dole payment sort of thing.

That’s exactly right. I would agree. And the funny thing about The Drones is they are a band who are revered in the city. All the people that are musically involved revere The Drones. No one doesn’t like The Drones. Yet, they’re not a band that is a Cold Chisel and goes out and just does every venue around. There’s this city thing about them, yet they make such Australian music. They make music that makes you feel like you’re in Dubbo, and things are not right. You know? But, they wouldn’t play in Dubbo. It’s the city thing. It’s a weird thing with The Drones.

They’ve got a rule they won’t play anywhere there’s no skyscrapers.

Really?

Yeah. They’ve tried to, but no one gets them.

They can’t get out of the cities? I find that bizarre. It’s partly because they are so revered that it’s almost like they can’t put a foot wrong. They’re better off going to Europe and playing to the same sort of audiences rather than go out of the city.

Yet, we [The Herd] have just gone out of the cities the whole time because there’s no rules for us. We haven’t set ourselves up as this band that everyone’s critically bowing down to. And The Drones are in that situation. I feel for them, because you don’t go overseas, play a bunch of gigs and get rich, you go overseas and just plug away hoping that you just eventually have some sort of a career in so many territories that overall, you’re presented with this picture of a normal income.

But yeah, I will happily join in the critical appraisal of them. I watch them and I’m floored. I think they’re an amazing group. But you do also notice that when you go outside of cities that if you don’t have a foothold in triple j and you don’t have that kind of presence, then you’re fucked. Straight up.

Everyone likes to deride triple j because it’s a city thing to do, to be condescending about triple j. It’s a very city thing. You go out into the country and you realize this shit means the world to them. They don’t have community stations. It’s the world. And you’re able to brush off a little bit of that city cool and go, “I know that this means so much to you. How dare I talk down to you.”

Now that you mention it: I’m from Bundaberg, and I grew up with triple j. Then I came to Brisbane and I have no inclination to listen to it because I listen to a local station (4ZzZ).

Rachael: I grew up in Gympie, and everyone was into Nova and all the Sunshine Coast stations. We didn’t know about triple j, or want to know about triple j. I’d say I only got into it in year 11 and 12.

I hear that argument so much and it’s just like - chatter, chatter, chatter. I don’t have to like all of triple j’s music to know just how important they are. They’re just fucking unbelievably important. God knows that commercial radio wouldn’t be playing half the music they would be playing from Australia if they didn’t absolutely have to play something.

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Thanks for your time, Tim. For more Elefant Traks, visit the label’s website. For more Urthboy, visit his MySpace. The music video for his track ‘Shruggin” is embedded below. If you like it, perhaps you’ll consider buying his albums.

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Andrew’s note: This is a guest post by Seamus Anthony, a Melbourne-based musician [pictured below right]. I’m mostly posting this because I can’t turn down anyone with an awesome name like Seamus. Just kidding - he’s a smart dude and a clever writer, which is why his words are appearing here.

Do Internet Marketing Techniques Work for Selling Music?
by Seamus Anthony

While music is my first love, I actually currently make more money as a website geek and, to a lesser extent, a writer. So I know how Internet marketing “squeeze pages” work, and how to write and build them.

Meanwhile, I have been going on my merry way making music but not exactly setting the Interwebs on fire.

Then, recently, I was casually watching a music marketing video (by Greg Rollett) and was immediately very familiar with the marketing model he was describing – and that’s when I had my giant D’OH! moment.

Basically Greg was advising musicians to use the very same squeeze page techniques that I get paid to implement for others.

It’s so obvious but I just never thought for one minute to try and use these techniques to sell and give away more of my music.

So I decided to roll out some classic Internet marketing techniques to see if it increased the consumption of my music.

The Classic Internet Marketing Model

Here’s how your typical online marketing system works:

• Drive leads (otherwise known as people) to your squeeze page.
• Use effective sales copy to get their name and email address in exchange for a freebie
• Send the freebie to their inbox
• After that the barrage of emails begins. The clever marketers will start by offering you some further free value, before starting to slip in the hard sell.
• Once a prospect buys something cheap, you then target them to buy increasingly expensive products.

For the purposes of this experiment, I am simplifying this model.

In my case the strategy is as such:

1. Send people to the squeeze page
2. Get them to opt-in to get their free music download
3. Send them a little bit more free stuff, like Youtube links, more free music downloads, maybe a short e-book or something.
4. Then hit them to buy a CD or download of something totally new
5. Send them some more free stuff
6. Ask for a second purchase, can be of something old, seeing as *cough* this abounds.

Might not sound all that groundbreaking but contained within that little plan is a LOT of work. For example: the squeeze page…

Firstly, I had a look at my existing website and knew straight away that I needed to build a new one. Why? Because squeeze pages by design have one single focus – getting visitors to fill in the opt-in form.

Next I needed a third party digital goods transaction and delivery provider that would enable me to allow some free downloads as well as easily hook into my mailing list management program. I eventually settled on DPD (http://getdpd.com) who provide you with the ability to sell or give away up to 10 digital products for a monthly payment of US$5 and have great integration with various mailing list management providers.

And so the page is up and working: www.SeamusMusic.com [pictured right]

Here’s a list of things I plan to do next:

• Improve the look of the page
• Improve the copy (words)
• Add a video to the page for those who don’t like to read
• Construct a sequence of auto-responder emails offering both paid and free content (music)
• Get as many links to the page as possible (social media, article marketing, online advertising)
• Send people who dig my live shows to the site
• Website optimization via A/B split testing

And that’s just the start; there is so much you can do – website optimization via A/B split testing anyone?

One thing I did already was stick the button up the top of a very stripped –down version of my MySpace page – www.myspace.com/seamusanthony – it will be interesting to see if that converts.

Fishing for Fans in the Great Sea of Content

Classic Internet marketing is not usually the kind of thing that musicians tend to consider appropriate for promoting their art. Yet to me, giving it a go makes perfect sense because getting more Facebook “likes” or YouTube views is one thing, and an important thing, but it’s not a sale.

Look at it this way: Once you send someone to look at your YouTube video – then what?

Mostly, after looking at your video for a bit, people just drift back off into an endless sea of content. Sometimes they spread the word for you, but then what? Not much, that’s what.

The thing that is inherently flawed about the way musicians in general (myself included) approach the whole music business palaver is that they only really expect to ever start making money once they are getting hundreds of thousands, if not millions of YouTube views and Facebook “likes”.

If your average small businessman had to get the attention of millions of people just to start making some $1 sales, forget it! They wouldn’t bother. Most small businesses survive due to their ability to make a decent wad of cash out of a manageable amount of customers.

For most musicians, the music-dollar is stuck under a big, heavy, inverted pyramid. How are they going to get the cash unstuck and into their pocket?? Possibly by putting some tried and tested Internet marketing techniques to work for them. The jury is out but I can report that I have had some encouraging results already. I’ll let you know how I go in a few months.

Seamus Anthony is a musician from Melbourne, Australia. If you like Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen or the Muppets, you may well want to get your free 4 track EP here: www.SeamusMusic.com. The music video for his track ‘An Interesting Life‘ is embedded below.

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Here at Waycooljnr, we love simple, elegant web design. No shit - our founding editor, Nick Crocker, started We Are Hunted. We love music blogs, too, but they tend to be giant, hulking beasts that require mouse-scrolling en masse. Sigh.

Exception: The Perfect Five, a simple, elegant, beautifully-designed piece of work. Its goal is simple: ‘a music blog for people who don’t have time for music blogs’.

Each week, its editor, Sophie Hirst [pictured right], picks songs to populate five categories: hyped, covered, classic, remixed, and loved. She writes a small blurb below each track outlining why it made the cut this week… and that’s it. The songs stream using an on-site player, and are grouped within an auto-playing playlist. Its simplicity is brilliant. We’ve been fans since it debuted in March 2010.

Sophie Hirst is a digital media strategist. She is currently the Marketing Manager at MySpace AU/NZ, and works on The Perfect Five as a side project. Her past clients include Nylon Magazine, Sydney Festival and Parklife. Put simply; when it comes to the online music space, she knows her shit. Her music taste is generally impeccable, too. (Sidenote: Thanks, Sophie, for putting me onto the Big Boi album.)

We asked her some questions.

Andrew: Why did you start The Perfect Five, Sophie? Was it a matter of creating something that you couldn’t find anywhere else?

Sophie: Definitely a bit of that. I have about 50 music blogs in my Google Reader that I skim regularly each week but it’s a pretty laborious process. I’d find myself getting into work in the morning and just wanting some good new music to listen to without having to search for it. That’s where I came up with the line ‘A music blog for people who don’t have time for music blogs’. I was also a bit bored of reading the same kinds of things, blogs just reposting each other’s news posts. I wanted to do something that took a different approach. It’s a bit like my online music scrapbook of what I’m into that week.

Which sites/blogs inspired you to start TPF? Had you been involved with any music blogs previously?

My friend and I started this blog (PDA Police) a few years back, but decided taking photos of people ‘getting it on’ in public was not only mean, but really time consuming.

Inspiration for TPF came from a lot of places – One of my favourite websites is The World’s Best Ever and they have a section called Sound Advice which is a weekly curated mixtape by a new person each week. I was really inspired by someone sharing a lifetime’s worth of their most loved songs. I was always creating weekly playlists on MySpace and wanted a blog to work off that. Some weeks the selections for TPF will come to me really easily, other weeks I spend (too many) hours looking for the right tracks. I really want to deliver something special each week, something that’s worth the reader’s time.

Aesthetically I love simple blogs like Famous Sounding Words and What I Heard Today.

Who was responsible for the design and tech side of things?

I have a great designer friend who helped me build it – I love the strong, simple layout he created. Hampus would agree it’s been a difficult and time consuming process. If he was charging me , I’d owe him a lot of money by now… It’s still a work-in-progress and we’re making improvements. At the start I intended to keep it pretty quiet until I was 100% happy with it, but I learned once you put something on the internet people will find it, even if you don’t want them to.

I like that you blend current music with some old faves; it’s a kind of musical history, as well as a weekly mixtape. How did you decide on the five criteria?

I’ve always listened to a lot of older music, and am a sucker for a good cover song so really wanted to include those. The ‘Hyped’ section was to make sure it was still relevant and for better SEO – I recently got TPF added to Hype machine, and the ‘Hyped’ track will get around 800-900 ‘favourites’, whereas the other sections will be a lot less.

I notice there’s no comments or interactivity on the site. Any particular reason for this?

I used to have Facebook ‘like’/Tweet buttons under each post and comments enabled, but it really messed with the aesthetic, to the point where it just didn’t feel right. I sort of like that it is what it is. I don’t really mind if it doesn’t grow – I’d still post even if it was just those core readers. I get a handful of really positive emails from people each week which makes it worthwhile. I’m still working to add some better functionality for readers to share what they’re listening to, or what they’ve discovered from the recommendations (like with you and Big Boi!).

What kind of traffic are you getting at the moment?

It’s still pretty small – for the last month Google Analytics shows 8,576 Visits, 11,960 Pageviews and growth of 205.76% but to be fair I think it’s a bit skewed – this one Metafile post alone created a pretty big spike with about 5000 PVs in 2 days. I had to upgrade the hosting package. The top referring traffic sources are direct, Facebook, Google and other blogs that have posted features on it, like this and this.

What are your goals for The Perfect Five? How big do you see it becoming?

At the moment my goals are focused on improving the site functionality, increasing the discover/share/inspire element and really just delivering quality content. I’m not really focused on growing the traffic that much at this stage and I don’t plan to put ads on it. I’m working on an special edition 100-track summer mixtape download, so keep an eye out for that!

Thanks, Sophie.

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You’d best visit (and subscribe to) The Perfect Five immediately. Sign up for their newsletter on-site, and/or follow them on Twitter. Sophie’s on Twitter, too, and MySpace (natch).

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This guest post was written by Julian Hewitt [pictured right], a music lawyer for Melbourne-based Media Arts Lawyers.

Jules works with a variety of Australian artists and events including Architecture in Helsinki, Lisa Mitchell, Miami Horror, Big Day Out, Boy & Bear, Falls Festival, and Operator Please. He uses a breathtaking handcrafted font called ‘Slim Aarons’ in all of his legal documentation.

Plagiarism, Copyright & The Human Factor

“Only God creates. The rest of us just copy.” - Michelangelo

“Always steal the best ideas. They are so much better than the bad ideas.“ - Recent advice from photographer Justin Smith

Art imitates life, but not nearly so much as it imitates art. Post-modernism made the act of referencing an existing work a conscious statement in itself, but music, art and literature have always been indebted to the influence of prior works. We don’t live in a vacuum, and artists do not create in one.

Music purists expect ‘authenticity’ from musicians, but there is no such thing. The Beatles pinched guitar riffs from Chuck Berry, Chuck Berry pinched guitar riffs from T-Bone Walker, and T-Bone was a protégé and stylistic disciple of Blind Lemon Jefferson. There are only a few small aesthetic steps to get from 1970’s Krautrockers Neu! to James Murphy’s LCD Soundsystem, and whilst Beethoven’s compositional style is considered “definitive”, it was “anticipated” by both Haydn and Mozart. In short, every song has a geneology that starts well before its first note.

The same is true of film and TV. One recent count suggests approximately 208 million films have been made since the birth of cinema, and yet screenwriting courses commonly suggest there are just eleven distinct film genres. NY Times film critic Janet Maslin said in 1983: “Hollywood may have never been more dangerously and unimaginatively beholden to its own past than it is right now” (and surely ate her words in 1984 upon the cinematic release of “Cannonball Run II”), and Quentin Tarantino learnt to make films by watching movies while on the job at the Video Archives rental store.

Television is no different. “There are only a handful of basic ideas,” says Fred Silverman, former programming head at ABC, CBS and NBC, “past those you are really into derivation.” Steven Bochco, who created a raft of successful shows including “Hill Street Blues”, “LA Law”, and “NYPD Blue” called making television “serving old wine in a new bottle.”

Are the visual arts more ‘pure’? Sam Leach’s Proposal for Landscaped Cosmos [pictured right] won the Wynne Prize for the best landscape painting of Australian scenery in 2010.

It was subsequently revealed that the painting was a reworking of 1600s-era Dutch artist Adam Pynacker’s Boatmen moored on the shore of an Italian lake [pictured left].

Outcry that Leach’s work was ‘unoriginal’ came largely from non-art media sources, upset that an Australian scenery prize was a copy of a Dutch work. Art-world criticism focussed instead on Leach’s failure to attribute the source material in the naming of his work, which is usual artistic practise, but seemed more casual on the issue of authenticity and originality. As Wynne judge Lindy Lee said: “Of course I can see there are structural similarities (but) there’s a long tradition of artists working from images of other artists“.

Does the realisation that Leach’s painting directly appropriates Pynacker’s impact the effect of the new painting? The knowledge contextualises Leach’s painting, and provides additional layers of meaning – as the newer work plays off a painting with its own distinct history. What would happen if Leach had copied Pynacker’s completely without making any changes?

In Languages of Art, Nelson Goodman questioned the relevance of authorship:

“Why there is any aesthetic difference… [to the] original work challenges a basic premise on which the very functions of collector, museum, and art historian depend?”

But there is no question that being the “originator” means something valuable to us. As Louis Armstong noted, “a lotta cats copy the Mona Lisa, but people still line up to see the original”. The value is not just in the painting, but in the fact that it is an expression of something unique, ‘new’, and not only a facsimile of a prior work.

Cultural bower-birding doesn’t always sit comfortably with broader society. If Pynacker’s painting was still capable of being protected by copyright, Leach would have likely infringed on that copyright. The function of copyright is to protect the artistic expression of an idea, rather than an idea itself. The separation of the expression of the idea from the idea may seem semantic, but it is significant. Copyright law does not care that a work is inspired by another copyright protected work, provided it does not actually reproduce that work.

How can this happen? Woody Allen [pictured right] acknowledges his stylistic debt to Ingmar Bergmann; certainly, many of Allen’s films contain direct visual references. In Bergmann’s The Seventh Seal, the hero plays chess with Death, which was re-created by Allen in Death Knocks with the chess substituted for gin rummy. But Allen’s characters do not use Bergmann’s scripted dialogue, and his films do not feature footage shot by Bergmann, nor utilise sound from Bergmann’s film.

In a musical context, taking an interest in the style or mood of an artist – or what they might call their distinctive “sound” - is perfectly acceptable, provided you don’t use extracts of their recordings or substantially reproduce their melodies or lyrics. So Wolfmother can ‘do’ Black Sabbath [see below video] without fear of prosecution - at least not from lawyers, although there are a few Sabbath fans who want to turn them into “children of the grave”

And Midlake can ‘do’ Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon” as “Roscoe” [see below video]. But like Wolfmother, they’re copping a ‘vibe’, as opposed to a melody or a lyric.

George Harrison unconsciously but directly referencing the melody of The Chiffons “He’s So Fine” in “My Sweet Lord” is a different matter entirely [see below video].

Harrison said at the time of judgement: “I still don’t understand how the courts aren’t filled with similar cases as 99 percent of the popular music that can be heard is reminiscent of something or other.”

The recent infringement case involving Men at Work’s “Down Under” had certain similarities to the Harrison/Chiffons case. Gregg Ham was the flutist for Men at Work. When he played on the 1979 and 1981 recorded versions of the Colin Hay/Ron Strykert composition “Down Under” he added a refrain “for the purpose and with the intention of evoking an Australian flavour in the flute riff“. [see below video]

More than 30 years later that “appropriation” resulted in Hay and Strykert (and their publishers EMI Songs) being successfully sued by Larrikin Music, the owners of the copyright composition “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree”, which bore melodic similarity to Ham’s “Australian flavour”. Ham said his musical reference of another copyrighted work was “inadvertent, naive, unconscious, and by the time Men at Work recorded the song… unrecognisable“.

Copyright legislation gives creators of artistic works a monopoly over those works for a limited period of time, and such laws stand right at the intersection of art and commerce. The cultural monopoly granted by legislation seeks to strike a balance between rewarding the investment of time and money made in the creation of artistic works by artists or their benefactors, and our desire as a society to maintain a freedom of cultural expression not unduly restricted by law.

The reason why the “99 per cent” of copyright infringements - as suggested by George Harrison - do not see the cold light of court is largely commercial. Kit Fennessy’s comments in The Age on February 6, 2010 highlighted this tension:

“Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree uses a bright, major scale. Down Under uses natural, minor chords with a relative major solo; a completely different sound with non-identical notes. You may as well sue the author of Kookaburra for ripping off Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. It is preposterous.”

The enforcement of a disputed copyright can be prohibitively expensive, and the reality is that most art works do not generate sufficient income to justify legal action from an aggrieved owner of a pre-existing work. At the time of the initial ‘Kookaburra/Down Under’ ruling, Colin Hay said: “I believe what has won today is opportunistic greed, and what has suffered is creative musical endeavour,” and in one sense he is right: if Hay’s career never progressed beyond the Cricketer’s Arms in Richmond, he would never have been sued and his creativity would not have been in any way compromised. When art becomes big business, creativity is subject to larger - and more legally minded - commercial forces.

Artist and graphic designer Andy Warhol is an interesting subject when discussing the proprietary value of copyright, because his works again and again infringed on third party copyrights (as did the works of many “Pop” artists. Warhol regularly used copyright controlled materials without permission or attribution, and he produced individual works and entire series’ based on other people’s photographs of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, press shots, and yet these infringements took place almost universally without legal incident over his working life of some 25 years as an internationally renowned artist. Even since his death there have been very few claims brought against his estate.

The Warhol print Green Car Crash (1963, pictured left) - which incorporates an unlicensed press photograph of an horrific car smash up used as the bed for the print - sold for $71,700,000 USD in 2008. At the same moment in time that Green Car Crash set an auction record, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc and the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board were being litigated against for denying recognition of various works claimed by collectors and art historians to have been authored by Warhol.

Denial of attribution when you are talking Warhol can easily cause problems. An example: the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board does not question that Warhol’s first print run of the famous ‘Red Series’ of self-portraits is authentic, but it will not endorse his second series of the same pictures. The reasoning of the Board is that Warhol was not present when the second run were printed, although they accept that Warhol was aware that the print had taken place and had even signed one of the prints in the second series.

Warhol’s printer Rupert Smith describes Warhol’s methods mid-1970’s: “We had so much work that even Augusto [the security man] was doing the painting. We were so busy, Andy and I did everything over the phone. We called it “art by telephone.”

Horst Weber von Beeren, who was responsible for painting many of Warhol’s later works has said that Warhol’s primary role in the creation of these paintings was simply to sign them when they were sold. Von Beeren had come to realize that a painting could be an original Andy Warhol whether or not he ever touched it. These works are all happily accepted as ‘original’ Warhols by the Board.

Aside from reinforcing the amount of money at stake in the attribution of authorship to a work, it highlights Warhol’s (unashamedly) tenuous link to much of the artwork that he “created”. The value in his mind being not in the artistic expression of an idea, but of the idea itself – the opposite value to that protected by copyright.

The Pop Art Portraits show in London in 2008 nicely illustrated the occasionally Orwellian nature of copyright in practice. At the show, the 1960s pop art on display was rife with copyright-infringing artworks that sampled everything from Minnie Mouse to Time magazine covers, whilst in the background the London National Portrait Gallery walls were plastered with “no photography” signs and lined with uniformed gallery staff whose job was to ensure patrons did not take (copyright-infringing) photographs of the artworks on display.

At some point, it seems the creative momentum of each generation moves from innovation to protection. This has been emphatically the case for generations born after the Second World War. The baby-boomers were almost single-handedly responsible for creating multi-billion dollar industries in music, film, TV, art, and entertainment geared specifically at teenagers. The huge value of these cultural works – and their ownership by large corporations looking to protect the value of these works – is the main driver towards the vast increase in copyright-related lawsuits in the last 30 years.

It is no coincidence that duration of copyright protection was extended in 1998 from 50 years to 70 years from the death of the author to prevent Disney icons like Mickey Mouse entering the public domain, nor was it surprising that the United States bill bearing the legislative amendment was championed by (and named after) 60s folk singer and former Californian senator Sonny Bono [pictured right].

In practise, lawsuits are not often brought by artists. Aside from the usual commercial limitations, artists are themselves more likely sensitive to the conflicts involved in claiming ‘originality’ of a work. When actions are brought, it is typically to prevent another artist unfairly profiteering from their creation, rather than to receive additional remuneration for the creative energy expended in generating the work in the first place. Thus, the creative monopoly in practise is not generally about use, so much is it about reward. For example, Brazillian artist Jorge Ben Jor sued Rod Stewart after realising “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” ripped off his melody from “Taj Mahal” [see below video], but withdrew his claim when Stewart donated all royalties from his song to UNICEF.

Such artistic and commercial conflict goes to the very core question of why a work is created in the first place: is the primary imperative commercial, or artistic? Had Marion Sinclair, the author of “Kookaburra…” been alive and in control of the copyright in her song, the likelihood of her suing for an infringement by “Down Under” is probably very low. Artists take pleasure in influencing future works, much in the same way that they were influenced in the creation of their work.

The same emotional response is simply not present when the rights are controlled by a third party corporation. Creative investments deserve to be protected - there are thousands of reasons why - but there is a strong tension at play between creation, appropriation and protection, and between artistic expression and the commercial monopoly which copyright grants over certain elements of that artistic expression.

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Besides his work with Media Arts Lawyers, Julian Hewitt is also the co-founder of a micro-label called Cohen Cooper & Roberts, a music supervisor for various film projects, a lecturer in music law, and he sits on the board of a number of public charities and events including the National Young Writers Festival and the Wired Lab.

He pens the odd self-serving article about how The Wire can be a metaphor for anything if you substitute the words “Chicken McNuggets” with “my idea”, and he also plays synthesizer in several bands and DJs badly. The last act he remixed was the Teenagers, who asked him to pull the saxophone solo out of his mix as it was “not appropriate”. He can be contacted via the Media Arts Lawyers website.

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Behind The Merch Desk: CD Sales

At a March show by American hard rock band Between The Buried And Me [pictured below], I visited The Hi-Fi’s merch desk afterwards, hoping to buy a CD to show my appreciation. While the wall behind the desk was adorned with a range of clothing apparel, a handwritten sign read: “No CDs - go download it.”

BTBAM: Disc-less in Aus.

Disappointment aside, this got me thinking: how prevalent is this occurrence among the international artists that tour Australia? It’s long been my personal preference to buy music directly from the artist at live shows, from local bands here in Brisbane up to the biggest touring acts. Stripped of the record store and digital retailer middle-men that cut into artists’ potential profit, I’d assumed that purchasing music from the merch desk was the quickest way to improving the artist’s bottom line.

Brian Taranto, managing director of Sydney-based merchandise and touring specialists Love Police, admits that a band will earn “marginally more” if a CD is bought at a merch desk, as opposed to online or in a record store. However, he states that the very act of offering CDs to the consumer at a live show is “largely a box-ticking exercise for record companies to say, ‘Yes, we’re selling music at shows’.” For the merchandising company, Taranto says, it’s a “painful and time-wasting experience. There are rare exceptions, but generally, throughout my 25 years of merchandising experience, it is a waste of time. I say that because CDs generally don’t sell. There’s a procedure involved with purchasing, paying for and returning product to the majority of record labels that is an accounting time-waster, unless there is a quick, clean and easy financial and logistical solution.”

According to Simon Lonergan, owner of TSP Merchandising Australia, the only way for CDs to be sourced for international acts is for the artist to ship them over, or for the merchandiser to buy the discs wholesale from an Australian record company. Both options are expensive, which is why the profit margins on CDs are so low. “The band knows they’re not going to make much money from CDs,” Lonergan says, “So they generally don’t want CDs hurting their t-shirt profits. You can get the music in other ways. If you can download it, that means that no-one has to freight discs around.” TSP handle around 150 international tours per year, including the recent AC/DC and Pearl Jam tours. Of those 150 tours, Lonergan estimates that only 15-20% request that the merch desk offers CDs for sale.

“I’ve been in the merch industry my whole life, and CD sales at live shows have never been good,” he tells me, effectively putting to bed my sneaking suspicion that consumer reluctance to buy the physical product is influenced by an increasing preference for digital music. At the independent end of the spectrum, artists don’t seem to be faring much better from live CD sales. Brisbane-based Lick It Media has presented the Brisbane legs of Australian tours by Crystal Castles, Metronomy and Datarock.

Lick It partner Matt Rabbidge suggests that in these instances, shirts are the primary merchandise offering. “In recent years, CDs seem to have become a second focus. I think that this comes down to the younger crowd these bands are attracting, who normally want to ‘wear’ their likes and dislikes. Bands see this as free promotion; if they can make a buck out of it while they do it, then so be it.”

From the front line as event promoter, Rabbidge doesn’t believe artists are losing out too much from CD sales. “I think that good bands are just getting smarter about how they make money now,” he says.” It comes down to more touring, playing festivals, and offering merch and digital downloads.” While TSP handled merchandising sales for the Australian leg of AC/DC’s Black Ice world tour - whose merch sales in this country alone grossed tens of millions of dollars - Taranto’s Love Police sold product for the tour’s support act, Wolfmother, whose shiny disc sales numbered just “a handful” across the whole tour. “That’s the big picture side of it: why would you spend significant money to see AC/DC and Wolfmother, then want to buy a CD?” Taranto asks. “Surely fans know their music by then; if not, they’ll buy it the next day. You can’t really put on a CD, like you can a shirt.”

On the logistical side, Lonergan suggests that the potential benefits for international artists looking to sell discs at shows are often offset by frustrations. “If you import something into this country, it’s got to go through a process customs. There’s a lot of paperwork, and I think the smaller bands decide it’s too much of a pain in the arse.” In his mind, the decision to nix offering CDs at live shows comes from a purely financial perspective. “I can see why a lot of artists don’t want to offer CDs: they think it’s going to take away a t-shirt sale. Why would they want to a sell a CD, when they could make four or five times the amount of profit through selling a t-shirt?”

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What’s your experience with buying music from the merch desk at concerts?

Do you prefer to sample before the show and buy direct from the band afterwards, or are you more interested in wearing your musical allegiances in t-shirt form?

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Hyperbole. R.I.P.

Sad news filtered throughout the Australian music blog community last week (via Pity The Cool, WhoTheHell and Sound Alliance) when it became apparent that the Google-owned free blogging service, Blogger, removed Hyperbole. We deemed the site the second best Australian music blog in March 2009.

Turns out that Blogger didn’t agree; its moderators decided that the site had received one too many MP3 takedown requests. With a few clicks from ’some gung-ho web sherrif’, three years and 600 posts passionately supporting the Australian music industry - all gone.

Hyperbole was run by inthemix.com.au deputy editor Dave Ruby Howe [pictured right], who took the time to answer some questions in the wake of what he deems an ‘excruciating’ experience.

Andrew: As you see it, what happened? Why did Blogger kill the blog?

Dave: Well I think it really comes from poor moderation services on somebody’s behalf. There was a time when I would post MP3s on there that were not cleared and looking back that was a poor decision. But for at least the past year I’ve only posted material sent to me by artists, labels, PR people, etc, which was cleared for blogging. I wasn’t trying to break exclusives with my blog anymore, it was more about writing and enjoying music.

So I kept receiving individual post takedowns for posts that were years old, and with no functioning links, so some gung-ho web sherrif saw that a post had once linked to some relatively high profile remix and then complained. My thinking is that Google got one too many of these and pulled the plug, neither party bothering to check what the content on the blog was.

All that work, down the drain. How do you feel right now?

I won’t sugar-coat it, it really does feel excruciating. Three years and six hundred posts later and it’s all flushed away. It’s brutal. And the worst thing is I have no way of redirecting any incoming traffic to the blog to my new host - hyperbole.tv. That stings the most I think, because readers might think that I have pulled the pin myself.

Do you think it’s possible for a Blogger-based music/mp3 blog to survive and thrive without being taken down?

Unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly clearer that that’s no longer an option. It’s a combination of Blogger’s lax moderation and overzealous label and industry tattle-tales that’s causing this, I’d say.

I’ll give you an example: Ellie Goulding. A UK singer who’s now a chart-scaling artist on Universal. I’ve done several posts on her in the last year or so, and those were with material provided by a friend and fellow blogger Derek Davies, who also runs the indie lable Neon Gold, which was putting out Ellie’s records. So he gives me and scores of other blog contacts some tracks from Ellie, and I remember specifically a Russ Chimes remix of her tune ‘Starry Eyed’, and I post it and it’s fine. That is, until after Ellie’s album has been released internationally and I get a takedown notice for it. It’s infuriating, and any contact you try to open with Google about these takedowns is never responded to.

For any blogger that wants to develop any kind of profile as an MP3 blog: don’t do it on Blogger. Simple as that.

What would you have done differently, knowing what you now know?

Well for one, I wish I’d taken more action. I actually registered the domain hyperbole.tv in March 2009, looking to overhaul my blog onto its own hosting and turn it into something more personal that I could use as a site for my own freelance activities and not just as an MP3 blog. But I just didn’t get my act together. The writing was on the wall earlier this year when a bunch of other blogs got yanked and I was determined to get out whilst I still could but I just wasn’t quick enough. As for the content, as I said, I was blogging cleared tracks for the past year so that didn’t need to be altered, I just needed to be off Blogger.

I’m trying to be positive about the whole thing though and treat it as a cleansing fire, of sorts. It’s sort of made me scramble and get things together for the next phase of Hyperbole which will hopefully achieve what I outlined earlier.

Thanks for your time, Dave.

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Bereaved  Hyperbole fans can follow the site over to hyperbole.tv. For old times’ sake, we’ve included some screenshots of the old site below. Click for larger versions.

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Last week I wrote a feature article for Australian music website Mess+Noise about Faux Pas, a Melbourne-based electronic artist whose ‘digital DIY’ approach has intrigued me since Waycooljnr founder Nick Crocker pointed me in his direction.

I’ve since found Tim Shiel - the man behind the Faux Pas moniker, pictured right - to be a great example of an artist willing to invest time in developing his online presence. Besides using his computer to write and record his art, Shiel offers his music openly and honestly with bloggers, and allows fans to buy and share his material with minimal fuss. Below is the unedited interview that I used as the basis for my Mess+Noise feature ahead of the April 2010 release of his new album, Noiseworks.

Andrew: How do you describe Faux Pas’ sound?

Tim: I like the term “future pop” which i read in a Mess+Noise review. I actually like a lot of the new words getting thrown around like “chillwave” and “dreambeat” or “wonky” because they seem to describe a feeling rather than a set of conventions, though i don’t know if any of those words would apply to what i’m doing.

What do you use to create your music?

I have a very simple setup in terms of hardware. I have a computer running Ableton Live and a few Midi controllers that i use to control it. On Noiseworks, I mostly used virtual instruments - there was almost no actual “recording” in the literal sense - though I did play guitar on a number of tracks, and also for a couple of tracks I hooked up a friend’s microphone and breathed into it.

The only thing I’ve ever spent any real money on is my speakers. Nearly everything happens ‘inside the box’ (ie. my computer) - and inside my miiiiiiiiiiind. I basically just sit in front of a computer and play with sound, following an internal logic that I’m almost completely sure only makes sense to me. I play around with things until they sound right to me, then I cross my fingers and hope that other people are into it too.

At the beginning of your career, your friend Wally de Backer [better known as Gotye] adopted a “completely DIY” approached influenced you to do the same, without entertaining the thought of label support. What did you find appealing about this method?

It just seemed to make sense. I got to know Wally back when he was burning CDs in his bedroom and printing covers on his inkjet and making handwritten notes. It worked for him right from the start because he was genuine about it, and really passionate. I could see that he was having a lot of fun managing that side of things, making direct connections with people. It looked like a fun way of doing it. I understand it’s not for everyone, but I actually enjoy it.

You’re fond of distributing your music digitally. What do you dig about it?

Well that’s how I get music. I download, and it’s been that way for me for so long that its just the way that makes sense. It is what it is. I tend to think of the physical product as a bit of an after-thought but that probably says more probably about my own personal habits than anything else.

In your experience, are there any drawbacks to digital distribution?

Some people still want physical things. I totally get that.

You state that you’re proactive about sending your music to blogs. What have you learned about dealing with fellow bloggers - what appeals to them, what doesn’t? Is it just a matter of ego-stroking?

Often its not hard to get their attention, if you are polite about it. My advice to anyone who is considering sending their music to a blog, or a radio presenter, or whoever – just be honest, be yourself. Show that you care. Don’t pretend to be anything that you’re not; that kind of thing is generally more obvious than you think it is.

Is it fair to say that community radio exposure was largely responsible to help you grow your fanbase?

Without question, yes. I don’t play live shows, so radio airplay and internet exposure are really the two main ways in which my music gets spread out there. And the thing with community radio is – and I know this is obvious, but sometimes it bears repeating – in the majority of cases it is the individual presenters who make the call about whether they are going to put your stuff to air or not. So there are a lot of individuals who I’m heavily indebted to. I owe a lot of people a beer.

Where does community radio sit among the Australian media landscape in 2010? Do you feel it’s more endangered now than when you were first introduced to it? ..which was when, by the way?

If anything it feels stronger. I think more people than ever are disillusioned by conventional media, which is becoming more and more homogenised and uninspiring, so people are looking to hear independent voices. Community radio stations are generally populated by the most engaged, most passionate, most outspoken individuals that you’ll find anywhere.

These are people who are deeply engaged with their various communities and they use community radio as a platform to inform and evangelise and give unique perspectives that come unfiltered. Straight from the source. In that sense, community radio presenters are like the best kind of bloggers – they’re largely uncensored, they’re very passionate, extremely knowledgeable often about a very specialised area of interest. But unlike bloggers, they are part of a flesh-and-blood community, a group of people. Community radio stations, whether it’s the obvious big ones or the smallest of regional stations, they are like families. They are real.

I’ve been listening to community radio since I was in uni, and my first experience on air was around that time too, on Plenty Valley FM – which, for those playing at home, is situated on Childs Road, Mill Park, near Stables Shopping Centre - my friend and I did a late night show which was largely about Joel Edgerton and sports poetry. It was a few years later I became involved with RRR.

Is music as a full-time pursuit a goal of yours? Is earning a living from your craft a realistic goal? Do you know of many friends and associates who have achieved it?

I know a couple. There’s a few different ways you can do it. If it happened for me that’d be great, but I’m not gunning for it. I don’t have a five-year plan or anything, apart from “Continue making music”. I think if you get into music having that as your goal, to make a living from it, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. Once you start thinking like that, you are bound to start making compromises creatively. That works for some people, and that’s fine, but its not something I’m interested in.

I’m definitely not of the mindset that only struggling broke musicians can make art of any value, and I’m open to the idea of using my music for commercial purposes – but I don’t take any of those considerations into account when I make the music. Its clichéd but I try to just make music that I can be proud of, if it ever led to commercial success – which is extremely unlikely - that’d be a happy by-product.

Your remix of the Paul Dempsey track ‘Ramona Was A Waitress’ appeared on the Ministry Of Sound Chillout Sessions XII compilation. Since this was, as you put it, your ‘first real experience dealing with the corporate side of the music industry’- how’d it go?

It’s an interesting one. I didn’t seek that out, it came to me. Paul Dempsey’s label approached me to do a remix, so I had a crack at it and I was happy with what I made. Then when I handed it over to them I also handed them all the rights to the song. This isn’t out of the ordinary, especially for a low-profile artist like myself, in fact I think its pretty standard.

So, it ended up on a Paul Dempsey single, and then they organised the Chillout Sessions thing, which I found out about later. Which was all cool. It was cool being able to take my sister to Sanity and point at a massive shelf full of Chillout Sessions CDs and say “I’m on that!”

But handing over 100% rights was not really something I was comfortable with, to be honest. I went into it with the understanding that that’s how it would be and I went with it because I really liked the remix I made, and didn’t want to be left in a position where I couldn’t do anything with it, and no one would ever hear it. But I’m not sure I’d want to make a habit of signing my songs away. That works for some people, but not me.

Was it lucrative? Is it something you’ll pursue now, or will you just keep the same ’see what happens’ approach?

I wouldn’t say it was lucrative, no. No way. I tend to approach everything with a ‘see what happens’ vibe. But no, I’m not beating down any major label’s door asking if I can remix their bands for cash.

If you were starting out in 2010, would you make the same choices that you did at the start of your career?

I think so. It honestly never really occurred to me to do it any other way.

Thanks for your time, Tim.

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Faux Pas’ latest release is Noiseworks [pictured above], a full-length album released via Melbourne label Sensory Projects and distributed via Inertia. Check out some of his stuff on Bandcamp, YouTube, MySpace and his blog before buying it directly from Shiel himself, or via iTunes.

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New Australian online music service Guvera is the flavour of the month at Waycooljnr.

First I interviewed its CEO, Claes Loberg, for The Vine, before publishing the full transcript here. And then I ‘road tested’ it for Mess+Noise, with the help from two independent Australian musicians - Ian Rogers from Brisbane doom rock trio No Anchor, and Melbourne electronic artist Faux Pas (Tim Shiel). Excerpt below:

In theory, Guvera is an admirable endeavour. But how does the service rate in terms of usability and practicality?

Checking The Boxes

Upon registering and before you’re able to download anything, Guvera demands that you begin filling out your profile with information on your favourite music, books, films, food, charities and so on. All up, there are eleven sections. Of course, what they’re trying to do is better match your tastes with the brands who advertise on the site. At launch, these range from Domino’s to McDonald’s, Casio to Band Hero.

This initial barrier, however, is an annoyance in itself. For example, if you’re interested in getting the new Nova-endorsed pop single, you’ll have to answer a series of questions first: whether you prefer “cop shows” to “cartoons”, or if you’d rather dine on “frozen meals” or “all you can eat buffet”. (Yes, those are all real options that appear on the site.)

By instantly demanding that the user tell Guvera their life story through a series of checked boxes, the chances of them mindlessly clicking their way through their profile are greatly increased. As a result, Guvera may well be subverting its initial aims: to allow advertisers to better “engage with” and target consumers by catering to their tastes. In this respect, they’ve got the order all wrong. The first few downloads should be “on the house”, so to speak, before the site requests that you play the marketing game.

Full road test over at Mess+Noise.

Have you tried Guvera? What are your thoughts?

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