Sunday 30 January 2011

The Go! Team Interview

The Go! Team seemingly came out of nowhere to take the music world by storm with debut record Thunder, Lightning, Strike in 2004. Its intoxicating marriage of samples, chants, rapping and childlike enthusiasm won them many friends and a Mercury nomination. Proof of Youth followed in 2007, but as early as January 2009, founder member Ian Parton was talking excitedly about The Go! Team's third album. That album, Rolling Blackouts, is finally here, and as well as the vocal stylings of frontwoman, Ninja, The Go! Team have worked with such varied artists as Dominique Young Unique, Lispector, Satomi Matsuzaki (Deerhoof) and Bethany Cosentino (Best Coast).

The Go! Team are about to head out on tour around the UK, but first, Ian Parton found the time to drop No Ripcord a line and give us an insight into the world of everybody's favourite team.

Lots of adjectives and genres are bandied about by journalists to try and accurately characterise the Go! Team sound. How would you describe your music?

I generally try and avoid describing it if I can but I guess its eclectic, occasionally cheeky, halfway between catchiness and trashiness, occasionally brassy, lots of ladeee vocals and sometimes featuring recorders.

What artists do you enjoy listening to and who would you say your main influences are?
My Bloody Valentine, Public Enemy, Velvet Underground, Boards of Canada, Sonic Youth, Roxanne Shante, David Axelrod, Curtis Mayfield, Ennio Morricone, The Shangri-Las, Deerhoof, Serge Gainsbourg...

There’s a joy and a playfulness to your music. Is this a conscious thing or do you naturally write songs with that feel?
No, it's never a conscious decision to write a happy song. I do like stuff that's kind of triumphant with blaring trumpets and stuff like that; I think we're treading a line with The Go! Team and never want to dip into Coke advert territory. For me, its genuine, there's no irony - I'm definitely interested in making music with personality and feel; I put that above professionalism and perfection.

Previous albums made heavy use of samples, but the songs on the new record were primarily written on guitar and drums. What prompted this change in the songwriting process and do you think you’ll be sticking with it in the future?
Well, I like to think we've never been too reliant on samples. People might assume we just put a beat on top of a sample and call it a song but we've always tried to apply songwriting to a sample, if you know what I mean. This album's definitely driven more by songwriting and features more singing, rather than the Double-Dutch chants people know us for. I wanted to make strange little pop songs; I've always been really into catchiness and melody because its the hardest thing to do, but not to have a hit or get into the charts. So on this record I was really putting melody first and letting it run the show. When you've got something you think is watertight, that's when you can start fucking it up. The record's different for a few reasons; it's more sing-y, more melodic, more panoramic, has more bass, it's more eclectic, plus it features a live teenage community brass band!

In interviews, you’ve mentioned you wanted the new album to have a “more widescreen” sound. How did you achieve that?
It's partly the production - to make it "sound" wider. Partly it's the songs; some have touches of Ennio Morricone and make you think of deserts and driving and stuff like that. This record is less lo-fi than the last two but its still not exactly Starbucks. In fact, I mastered the whole record onto a C90 cassette at the very last stage to give it a more fucked up quality.

You’ve worked with a wide range of artists on this album, including Satomi from Deerhoof and Bethany from Best Coast. How did those collaborations come about?
I would write a song and then think about the kind of voice that would suit the song, so it was back-to-front really. I had one song called Secretary Song which made me think of a 60's office in Tokyo and secretaries all typing in time, hating their jobs, and it had a melody in the chorus which reminded me a little of Deerhoof. Because we kind of know Satomi - they asked us to play a festival they were curating in Belgium earlier this year - it was easy for us to ask her and I knew it would work perfectly. With Bethany from Best Coast I had a song called Buy Nothing Day that had a Californian girl group kind of feel; I discovered Best Coast on MySpace and loved her voice. This was about December 2009, so before all the Best Coast hype; maybe I should be an A&R man!

When Thunder, Lightning, Strike started to do well, you had to put a band together in order to go on tour. Did its success surprise you? Were you caught off-guard?
Yeah, I never dreamt we would be together 6 years later. It started off as a hobby and I didn't have any idea of how people would react. All I remember is listening to Thunder, Lightning, Strike and thinking, "I can't think of anyone else that sounds like this." We might have been hyped too quickly; we were playing sold-out shows in Manhattan when we weren't actually very good.

You don’t allow your music to be used in adverts. Why is this and what do you think of Go! Team-like music being written specifically for ads?
There have been a few cases where it's totally obvious some advertising executive has given a Go! Team CD to someone and said, "copy this"; a Google ad in Russia clearly ripped off Junior Kickstart. I have said no to lots of stuff and sacrificed a lot of money - mainly because I know it ruins a song when all you can think about is some yoghurt or something. Iggy Pop has fucked it doing those insurance ads. I have had to mellow a little on ads though; in the US we have a song on an NFL ad - it's actually quite a good ad though. It's these massive American football players with headphones on sitting on a bus, rocking out to the Go! Team. It's pretty funny because I'm the least sporty bloke ever.

You’re on tour in the UK throughout February - what can people expect from your live show?
Lots of swapping instruments, lots of jumping around, lots of fucking noise. Our drumkits have flashing light-up stars on the front of them now and we have a typewriter on stage with us too!

The King Is Dead


The Decemberists - The King Is Dead
released 17 January 2011 on Rough Trade


You could make a convincing case for The Decemberists being the most consistent band of the 21st Century so far. The King Is Dead is their sixth full-length LP, the latest in a run of uninterrupted quality which began with Castaways and Cutouts in 2002. Over the course of their career, they’ve seemed more than content to plough their own furrow in the margins, slowly accumulating fans and sales through word of mouth and good, old-fashioned first-rate songwriting. Upon listening to more recent Decemberists records, the most striking features are the often long, epic tracks and the meandering stories told. Colin Meloy knows how to spin a yarn, and his third-person tales of subterfuge and murder are regularly more compelling than even the most gripping crime novel. This trend reached its natural conclusion in 2009 withThe Hazards of Love; a prog-rock opera of sorts, where a single tale was told over the course of the album, featuring multiple characters and repeated riffs throughout.

The Hazards of Love was so rich and complex, and had so many layers of intrigue, that it still feels as if it hasn’t fully revealed all its charms; every listen provides something new. This brings about the rather unusual position of the world maybe not yet requiring a new Decemberists record. It may be a deliberate move away from the ideas that underpinned The Hazards of Love, but The King Is Dead is as different to its predecessor as it’s possible to be while still remaining very much a Decemberists record.

Those enormous opuses? Gone: only one track on The King Is Dead clocks in at over five minutes - in fact, the whole album barely breaks the forty minute mark. Those enveloping third-person narratives? Not quite gone, but there’s a definite lyrical shift towards more impenetrable first-person tales.

Initially, these changes may appear worrying - have The Decemberists lost what made them so distinctive? It depends on how you look at it; it may not bear their most striking hallmarks, but it’s still a marvellous batch of songs. Shorn of lofty concepts, the band are able to relax into their music more, and there’s a much more pastoral undertone here. Folk singer Gillian Welch joins the quintet for lead single, Down By The Water, and is a revelation, her harmonies lifting an already fantastic song to an even higher level, much like Emmylou Harris did on Bright Eyes’ I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning.

The Decemberists display a more prevalent Americana influence throughout The King Is Dead; strong harmonies are pushed to the fore and the overall result isn’t all that dissimilar to what Midlake achieved withThe Trials of Van Occupanther. The lyrical change of direction happily hasn’t blunted Meloy’s verbal sharpness; the passage where he tenderly intones, “You were waking/The day was breaking/A panoply of song” in June Hymn is enormously affecting. This restraint is a recurring theme of the album, which truly allows the melodies to shine. And what melodies they are! The Decemberists have an innate gift for creating snippets and phrases that burrow their way into your subconscious and surface at the most unexpected times. The best example of this is the simply gorgeous January Hymn: an acoustic-led ballad with a comforting, reassuring warmth.

It’s not all campfire sing-alongs though. Rox in the Box is a rollicking tune with a dark, brooding undercurrent, while This Is Why We Fight features a rumbling rhythm and a chorus with real bite. There are minor quibbles - opener Don’t Carry It All is a little one-dimensional and All Arise! sails close to ambling AOR - but The King Is Dead remains a highly recommended collection of songs. It’s laudable that The Decemberists are still prepared to try something different, still prepared to break away from what they’re known for. There’s a tiny concern that they’ve lost something which set them apart from the pack, but as long as they’re still capable of writing such strong material, they’ll retain their deserved reputation.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy


Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
released 22 November 2010 on Mercury

There are many reasons to admire Kanye West. His use of social media and constant self-promotion make him one of the best marketers in the business. He’s created some of the best tracks of the past decade, from slow jams to meditations on religion. He’s not afraid to try new ideas and he always makes the uncompromising albums that he wants to make. Unfortunately, this time, Kanye’s aim isn’t true.

Despite receiving almost blanket praise since its release, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is an arduous listen. Kanye’s always believed the hype surrounding him (in fact, most of it’s self-generated) but here he descends into solipsism all too often. He’s clearly a man on a mission, keen to tell the world that he’s still the top dog the others have to beat, but he takes it too far. Interludes aside, only three tracks clock in at under five minutes, making My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy over one hour long. That’s a large amount of space for any record to fill, and Kanye tries to do it with little more than braggadocio at times.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy has its share of good tunes, they just tend to outstay their welcome. Also, Kanye isn’t as good as he think he is. The album is littered with guest appearances and, as a rule, they show him up and provide a welcome relief from Kanye’s monologues. Monster is a case in point - it’s one of the best tracks but would be better yet if it featured no Kanye whatsoever. If the intention of Monster is to showcase how threatening you are, Kanye comes off worst, with Nicki Minaj in particular putting in a performance so intense as to be positively unnerving.

It must be said, however, that the production on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is top notch. It’s edgy, it’s brooding and remarkably gritty for a mainstream star. Kanye is arguably the biggest star in hip-hop since the salad days of Eminem, and thankfully he hasn’t gone down the same route of bouncy pop novelty like Shady did.

There’s a fantastic album lurking within My Dark Twisted Fantasy. It has the same number of tracks but is about a third shorter. It’s not so obsessed with revenge and retribution, and it features Kanye in the form of his first two records. Unfortunately, what we’re left with is a bloated mess and the promise of what might have been.

Hitler Moustache


Richard Herring - Hitler Moustache
released 25 October 2010 through PIAS Comedy

At the time of writing, there have been no articles in the right-wing press condemning comedian Richard Herring’s latest DVD, Hitler Moustache, but surely it’s only a matter of time. Of course, it’s not actually offensive to anyone with any sense of reason, but seeing as it contains a man sporting a toothbrush moustache making jokes about Nazis, Jews, Madeleine McCann and racists, it’s sure to get self-appointed protectors of taste and decency frothing at the mouth. If Richard Herring isn’t proclaimed “vile” in the Daily Mail by Christmas, I’ll eat my SS uniform.

There’s an interesting debate as to whether any topics should be off-limits in stand-up comedy. Personally, I don’t think any subjects should be, as long as they’re well-handled and not covered simply for gratuitous shock value. Herring’s potentially on thin ice throughout Hitler Moustache, but adroitly side-steps the pitfalls with a well-researched and thought-provoking set. Like erstwhile partner Stewart Lee, Herring is an articulate, intelligent man who sees comedy as a possible force for good and seeks to expose pomposity and hypocrisy where he can. If that all sounds a bit high-brow, don’t worry; he also can’t resist a good cock joke.

The premise behind Hitler Moustache is simple yet intriguing. The toothbrush moustache used to be associated with Charlie Chaplin and thus, comedy. Yet, since World War II, it’s come to represent Hitler and all he represents. Like the Swastika - originally a Hindu peace symbol - it’s been appropriated by the Nazis to mean something completely different. Herring wonders why this is and if it’s possible to reclaim the toothbrush moustache for its original comedic purposes.

You may be forgiven at this point for thinking that the rest writes itself: man grows toothbrush moustache, goes out into the world, recounts his experiences, hilarity ensues. Well, that does happen, but Hitler Moustache goes deeper than that, messing with our preconceptions and challenging perceived wisdom. Do racists have a point? Well, obviously they don’t, but Herring comes up with a clever argument as to why they’re less racist than you and I.

Herring clearly feels strongly about his subject, but all too often his rants become closer to sermons and more hectoring than funny. You can’t help thinking that if he really wants to change people’s views, he’d be better off not preaching to the converted as he is here. Crucially for a comedy DVD though, it elicited only two actual laughs from me in ninety minutes. Regardless of its intentions, the raison d’ĂȘtre of comedy is to be funny, and while Hitler Moustache is an engaging piece of social commentary, it sadly falls down where it’s most important.

33 1/3: The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society


Andy Miller - 33 1/3: The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society
published 1 November 2003 by Continuum

It’s difficult not to feel sorry for The Kinks. Primarily known as a singles band, their beautiful yet flawed concept album, The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society was two years in the making, yet couldn’t have hit the shops at a worse time. On 22nd November 1968, Village Green was released, as was a self-titled double album by a fairly popular beat combo called The Beatles. The public adored The Beatles’ forward-thinking vision, which set the tone for the future of popular music, while The Kinks’ sepia-tinged nostalgia seemed immediately antiquated. Village Green sank like a stone in the ‘60s, but has subsequently become The Kinks’ best-loved record.

Writer Andy Miller gives a detailed look into the circumstances surrounding the writing and recording of the album, and it makes for an absorbing read. This is a story of false starts, indecisive minds and difficult relationships, all held together (barely) by the songwriting genius of Ray Davies. It paints the picture of The Kinks - and Davies in particular - as outsiders, under-valued in their time, not seeing any reason to reach for higher concepts in their songs when there was still so much to explore within ordinary people.

Miller makes use of multiple sources and references, and sometimes it’s the smallest titbits of information that are the most revealing. For all their pastoral charm, The Kinks were still a group of friends from Muswell Hill who liked nothing more than a laugh: Dave Davies was known to conduct interviews with “LOVE” and “DAVE” written on his knuckles, while bassist Pete Quaife said of a particularly notorious groupie, “every group knew her, especially The Dave Clark Five”.

The story behind Village Green is an interesting one and the book is eminently readable, though Miller is prone to hyperbole on occasion (is Big Sky really “as good as anything written in the 1960s”?). It does fizzle out somewhat towards the end, however, with discussion of B-sides and unreleased tracks rather than maybe assessing the importance of Village Green today and its role in the wider world of music. The book also hints at episodes in the life of The Kinks that may make for more fascinating reading: the story of their ban from performing in America, the fractious relationship between the brothers Davies, The Kinks’ decline into polished stadium rock. An indispensable book for the story of Village Green this may be, but if you really want to get under the skin of The Kinks, there’s further reading to be done.

Thursday 13 January 2011

How the Internet Changed Music

Part 1 - Print Journalism

Now we’re here in 2011, the pre-Internet era seems rather quaint. It’s also frightening to look back and see how quickly the technology has progressed: Google started life as a research project fifteen years ago, Facebook celebrates its seventh birthday this year and Twitter is barely out of short trousers. For the music fan, the Internet is an invaluable resource in terms of listening, discovery and information. The days of waiting for a magazine to hit the shops so you could find out the latest news from your favourite band are long gone; nowadays you’d check their website, find out from a social network or search a blog. But is this an entirely good thing?

It would be easy to adopt a contrary viewpoint and fetishise physical magazines but so far in the 21st Century former big names, Melody Maker, The Face and Smash Hits fell by the wayside. This may not seem like big news, but Melody Maker alone indirectly led to the formation of Depeche Mode, Suede and The Jimi Hendrix Experience. It’s true that magazines used to go under in the pre-Internet era too, but magazine readership has been decreasing for a while now: last year, circulation of the NME fell by 17.3%.

Now the value of magazines as a source of news has all but disappeared, they’re more of a niche interest. David Hepworth founded Q, Mojo and The Word Magazine, and has observed a sea change in the role of the music magazine: “The economic basis of the music magazine used to be: readers who needed to buy them to keep up and advertisers who needed them to reach record buyers. Both groups have gone away. In their place you have: readers who like to read and advertisers who need to reach this valuable minority. It's not the same.”

So, how do music magazines buck that trend and get their readers to stay loyal? Why should people pay for writing when the Internet is full of music websites offering their content for free? One idea is that of the brand extension; you’re not just purchasing a magazine, but buying into something much bigger. For example, as well as a monthly magazine, The Word gives away cover mounted CDs with each issue, releases a weekly podcast and has a thriving online readers’ forum. These extras don’t bring in any money, but they make readers more likely to continue to buy the magazine and this in turn will hopefully lead to the holy grail for magazine publishers: subscription. David Hepworth explains: “We really value the site, the podcast, the Twitter feed and all the other means of interacting with the readership but the only one we can get any kind of revenue for at the moment is the magazine. I think they make people feel closer to the magazine, which is good.”

Another way to keep your readership loyal is to offer a consistently high standard of professional journalism which can’t be found anywhere else. It’s no accident that the biggest music magazines don’t make all their content freely available online. In a world where information is widely available for no cost, it’s going to be difficult to persuade people to part with their hard-earned cash for your work.

One area which seems to be in a state of flux is the newspaper industry. Most UK newspapers make all their content available for nothing on their websites while simultaneously expecting people to fork out for the physical edition too. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t look to be a sustainable business strategy, and advertising revenue isn’t filling in the gaps either. Add this to widespread music piracy and we’re in severe danger of future generations growing up believing that all recorded music and quality journalism should be free, not taking into account that people need to make a living and should be financially rewarded for their endeavours. Eamonn Forde is a freelance music journalist and is worried for a future where everyone expects everything gratis: “I think people need to know that it [art] has to be paid for, whether that’s by handing over money in a newsagent’s or a paywall payment every month. But the culture of free, where everything’s free and everything’s going to be paid for by advertising, what you’re going to get is that all culture’s going to be like Metro.” For the uninitiated, Metro is a free newspaper distributed throughout the UK, particularly in London where it’s typically found in train and underground stations. Thanks to the fact it’s free, it’s advert-heavy and tends to feature lots of lighter news items, rather than hard-hitting, factual reporting. We can assume Eamonn Forde isn’t a fan: “It’s going to be this say-nothing, kind-of-press-release, unquestioning, uncritical smug culture and that’s bad for culture overall. I think quality products should come with a quality price tag. I think Metro is like an early warning from history and there is the thought that we get the culture that we deserve. But if that’s culture, then creatives will go somewhere else because they have to make money.”

In June 2010, The Times - a British newspaper founded in the 1700s and with a circulation of over half a million - put its website behind a “paywall”, meaning anyone wanting access to the online content would have to put their hands in their pockets first. The words, ‘stable door‘, ‘horse’ and ‘bolted’ probably spring to mind, and reports suggest the amount of traffic to The Times website has, unsurprisingly, plummeted. However, Sunday tabloid, News of the World has also announced plans to put its site behind a paywall, so maybe this is the future. However, it should be noted that The Times and News of the World have the same parent company, News International (proprietor: one Rupert Murdoch).

These newspapers and magazines have to make money to stay afloat, but they also want their stories to be read by as many people as possible. As a reader, what’s the incentive to pay the money, asks Eamonn Forde? “You might like the writers, but you can find all the information from The Guardian or The Independent.” It’s true, you may like particular writers, but many of them are freelance, and could end up in the peculiar situation where some of their work is available online for free and some isn’t. From a personal perspective, how do they feel about something on which they worked so hard being given away?

Jude Rogers is a freelance journalist who writes about music for The Word, The Guardian, The Times and pop culture website The Quietus. She recognises not everything can be free, but having your work widely available certainly has its advantages: “Everything can be linked on Twitter, which I do do, which is really helpful to spread your work around. I love the fact my stuff’s on The Guardian and people can read it and also, if you want to pitch your work, you can say, ‘Look, here’s my stuff on The Guardian‘.” She also has first-hand experience of The Times paywall: “I did an interview, for instance, this summer with a Tory MP called Louise Bagshawe who also writes trashy, holiday, chick-lit novels, and she came out with some really juicy stuff and I thought everyone would be talking about it, but it was behind the paywall. It’s frustrating when people can’t read my stuff; in a professional capacity I’m more than happy for people to read it online.”

It looks like it would be premature to read newspapers and magazines their last rites in 2011, but the facts remain that the current trend is alarming and needs to be addressed. Currently, a combination of professionalism, goodwill, advertising and innovation is helping the industry muddle along, but how long can that last? The answer could lie with the bloggers and ‘citizen journalists‘ who may give the industry a shot in the arm while simultaneously posing the most dangerous threat.

Part 2 - Blogging

If you’re ever in the locality, you really must visit No Ripcord Towers. Situated in London’s leafy and exclusive Kensington, the building is festooned with original Renaissance artwork and marble statues. Each writer has their own office with a view of the city, antique writing desk, butler and Jacuzzi. We hand out free gold discs to visitors on arrival, and if you don’t see us sauntering down the corridors flanked by swimwear models, we’re probably drinking Cristal and jamming in our state-of-the-art, underground recording studio.

Of course, you know that description couldn‘t be further from the truth. No Ripcord is basically a labour of love, dependent on the time, hunger and talent of its writers. We receive no money for our work; we do it because of our enthusiasm for the music we like and the enjoyment we get telling people about it. In the pre-Internet age, a collection of people coming together in the way the No Ripcord team has would have been impossible, but it’s now a common story. Anyone, from the most learned academic to the most reactionary imbecile has a worldwide platform from which to share their thoughts.

The fact anyone can start their own site and contact anyone they want is a fantastic thing, according to Guardian journalist Jude Rogers: “If I was 18 now and wanted to be a journalist, I’d start a blog, just to be able to write something and try and connect to an audience. There are 18 year olds who track me down and email me and I think it’s wonderful, I wish I’d been able to do that when I was that age.” It’s hard to disagree with that; it’s a fantastic form of democracy in action. Theoretically, the cream should rise to the top, but is that always the case? Jude Rogers continues: “I think the best thing to do when you’re writing a blog and want to be a writer is just to work really hard at it, read writers that you like, keep in touch with your subject, start speaking to editors but do it in a way that they’ll understand. Editors always want people who have great, new ideas. You’ve got to be prepared to work, you’ve got to be prepared to get rejections.”

Of course, give everyone a voice and there’s a danger of it becoming a case of who can shout the loudest. Go to any YouTube video with a decent number of hits, read the comments below and you’ll find that your faith in human nature has likely evaporated. This is a trend that reaches far wider than videos of kittens; the comment sections of broadsheet newspaper sites and the BBC are overflowing with bile. “There’s a whole ream of people whose automatic start position is ‘whatever somebody has said, I fundamentally disagree with it and I will shout them down‘,” believes Music Week journalist Eamonn Forde. “It’s just unleashed people who’ve got no opinions but think they’re Charlie Brooker. It’s opened up the floodgates for people to jump up and say, ‘you’re a cunt‘, repeatedly at somebody.”

As extreme as that may seem, it’s easy to see why journalists might feel aggrieved by this sort of behaviour. Imagine someone comes into your place of work and begins to openly criticise everything you’re doing. You’d be annoyed, but what if you then discovered that this person has no knowledge or experience of the field in which you work? Moreover, it then turns out there are a group of upstarts trying to unseat you by doing exactly the same job as you, but in their spare time and for no wage.

Journalist Andrew Marr provoked outrage in 2010 at the Cheltenham Literary Festival with his comments on bloggers. “A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting”, he opined. “So-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.” Leaving aside the fact that Mr. Marr is employed by the BBC whose own website has many blogs and seems to constantly ask the public for its opinion on news matters, it smacked of someone horribly out of touch. “Andrew Marr is talking rubbish”, says Word Magazine founder David Hepworth, “And you and I are paying for the pulpit from which he says it. He should know better.” Eamonn Forde has a different view: “I think Andrew Marr has confused the comments sections on websites with blogs. That sounded like a man floundering in the 21st Century to understand communication, which is kind of bitterly ironic for somebody who’s a journalist and opinion-giver to, in broad brushstrokes, dismiss a whole generation of new writers and that whole way of communicating.”

It would appear that everyone - with the possible exception of Andrew Marr - would agree that blogging is very much a good thing. In fact, it seems that even established writers, keen to escape the constraints of editorial staff and deadlines, have got the blogging bug too. “Why do I blog? Because, in the words of Bob Dylan, ‘I've got a headful of ideas that are driving me insane’,” says David Hepworth, “And because in my blog I don't have to compromise with anyone but myself.” Towards the end of 2009, Jude Rogers began work on a blog with a twist, entitled 50 Songs, 10 Years. The premise was simple: as the decade drew to a close, she chose fifty songs that had shaped the previous ten years of her life, and wrote a short daily entry on her experience and why that song mattered to her. It was a huge success: “So many people responded to it. I get emails about things that I write for the Guardian, but I got such a response for this it was really exciting. Since then, a couple of writers have come up to me and asked if I want to do a book about it. I had a meeting with my editor at the Guardian after finishing my column, and she said it was the best writing I’d ever done, and I think it was because it wasn’t for a commissioning editor, but for myself, and I still think that’s the writing I enjoy the most.”

So, maybe the best journalism will come from people writing for themselves. Free from the pressures of an in-house style and appealing to the broadest market, bloggers are able to write exactly what they want, how they want. In fact, that’s where this article has come from; I wasn’t told to write it, I had the idea, I pitched it and now here we are.

One downside of the Internet’s unstoppable growth is the demise of the much-loved paper fanzine. The convenience of websites is impossible to beat, and they can be updated on a daily basis, but it’s hard not to miss the physical product: the cut, pasted and photocopied paper available at your local record shop (also probably not there any more - thanks, Internet). Jude Rogers started Smoke: A London Peculiar as a love letter to the city she adored. Despite this only being in 2003, it already sounds like a bygone age: “We saved up around £600, it took about a year. We printed a thousand up and we literally went round all the shops in London with copies in our rucksacks. It seemed like the right thing to do, we thought we’d give it a go. Luckily, some bookshops took it, it sold out quite quickly and it went from there”.

Maybe it’s quixotic to mourn the loss of the fanzine, but that story seems to have a romanticism and a determination to it that the setting up of a website could never possess. It seems that in 2011, it’s about making the Internet work for you. It’s too late to halt the march of the bloggers and the citizen journalists, so use it to your advantage. It’s never been easier to set up your own site, but at the same time it’s never been more difficult to stand out from the crowd. If you want to be a music journalist, just start writing! After all, as well as changing the way we write about music, the Internet is constantly changing the way we consume music too.

Part 3: Listening and Discovery

It’s easy to be blasĂ© about it now, but the fact you can walk round with thousands of tracks stored on a miniature gizmo is an incredible thing. What would have seemed space age little over a decade ago has become commonplace. On top of this, the Internet has completely changed the way the public at large purchases and consumes music. The vast majority of single sales are now from digital stores such as iTunes and piracy is rife. It’s all too easy - not to mention an enormous temptation - to find a torrent of a new record, and although it’s difficult to visualise a direct link between your actions and an artist struggling to make ends meet, professionals need to be remunerated for their work. It’s a familiar theme, and one that’s already been discussed with regards to journalism.

But as well as changing the way we purchase and access music, has the Internet changed how we actually listen to music? Music Week’s digital editor Eamonn Forde certainly thinks so: “Things like iTunes have flipped it away from the idea of ‘a body of work’ to tracks. So, that’s almost thrown us back to the 1950s where it was all about singles. Album sales have struggled along but single sales are booming; digital has completely revived the singles market. Now, around 3 million singles are sold in the UK every week; it’s phenomenal.”

It appears that however you create a new product or technology, the public will utilise it as they see fit. Acts such as The Beatles may have resisted making their music available via iTunes for years (though that was also to do with a legal wrangle over the Apple name) but even they relented in late 2010. Though single sales are on the up, this doesn’t necessarily represent good news for record companies who make the most profit through album sales. Maybe this will make artists up their game though; in the future, perhaps they won’t be able to get away with two or three tracks of filler if they know buyers are going to cherry pick the songs they want.

The popularity of single track downloads is also bad news for traditionalists who see an album as a cohesive whole with a carefully chosen track order to be listened to in its entirety. Guardian and Word Magazine journalist Jude Rogers puts herself firmly in that camp: “I went through a huge period when I first had iTunes and an iPod of having your whole record collection on shuffle - it was so exciting. Something would come up that you hadn’t listened to for ages, but I’m getting a bit tired of that. Maybe it’s me getting older, I like to listen to records from beginning to end and remember what it’s like to know exactly what’s coming next from song to song.” As well as people conforming to this listening trend, the sheer ubiquity of music also reinforces the idea of it as a commodity of little value. It’s fantastic to be able to purchase an act’s entire back catalogue at the click of a button, but gone are the days of investing time in a record and coming to love it. If an album has no immediate impact, it’s likely to be consigned to the virtual scrapheap without even a cursory second listen. This pattern has worked its way into the industry, where an act is unlikely to be given money to make an album if their debut isn’t a huge smash. Artists need to develop, and it’s interesting to consider in today’s cutthroat climate whether Bob Dylan or The Beach Boys would have been given the time to reach the heights of Blonde on Blonde or Pet Sounds.

The Internet has revolutionised the music industry, and Apple in particular have been huge beneficiaries of this. But Apple don’t always get it spot on. Take Ping, a social networking application built into iTunes which came into our lives in 2010. Designed as a service for friends to recommend music to one another, Steve Jobs described Ping as “sort of like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes.” Yet without Facebook integration, it’s difficult to see who’s going to want to go through the bother of setting up the new profiles and friends lists that a Ping account would require. In a world of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pandora and last.fm amongst others, do we really need Ping? Eamonn Forde is sceptical: “I think for Apple to have been the pioneer of hardware and software elegance and really brilliant user interfaces for ten years, to throw this weird, almost apologetic, so-called social network in iTunes, buried in this little link where you have to open it up and wait for it to load; it’s just so cumbersome and fiddly. It looks like a really, really poor version of Facebook. I tried to give it a go and I just really didn’t see the point and I don’t think Apple really know what it’s for. I think it’s symbolic of Apple’s arrogance and I think it’s symbolic of the fact that Apple have actually faltered for the first time.”

Apple may have been the leaders in online music throughout the 21st Century, but as well as the relative failure of Ping, they also have to keep their eye on the new kid on the block: Spotify. Though currently unavailable outside of Europe, the online music streaming service has around ten million users and approximately the same number of tracks. It’s the equivalent of having the world’s largest iTunes library and what‘s more, it’s free! So, as it’s all legal and above board, that must mean that artists are paid royalties for streams of tracks, so how does Spotify make money? Through a subscription model, where for a monthly fee, users get unlimited access, no adverts and premium features such as Android/iPhone integration. Eamonn Forde shares his take on it: “The issue with Spotify is that it can only go so frequent with the advertising otherwise it drives people away. It’s a very, very tricky balance because they’re going for the subscription model but learning it’s a very slow build. They’ve got a 6.5% conversion rate, they’re very much heading in the right direction, but whether or not the business model can sustain it while it rises up until that time when they get double digit [percentage] subscribers; it’s debateable whether they’ve got enough capital to ride that through, because they’re losing money at the minute.” It’s clearly an incredible application and you have to wonder if Apple could keep their stronghold were Spotify to go global. It’s difficult to see why anyone would use iTunes for anything other than syncing their iPod or iPhone if there’s a practically infinite amount of music available through Spotify. Bad news for Ping and for Apple, but more good news for the consumer.

Yet again it comes back to the question of the value of music (which could probably be extended to include art in general). It sounds obvious, but someone who has saved up to buy a record will treasure it more than someone who can listen to it for free whenever and wherever they want. Consumers are unlikely to worry about the finances of record companies and the long-term sustainability of the business in the here and now. When so much is instantly available, the main issue the music fan of 2011 is likely to face is being overwhelmed by choice. Word of mouth is still the most effective form of recommendation, and this links back to the numerous bloggers evangelising about their favourite tracks online.

The epitome of this sharing and recommending attitude is the Hype Machine: an mp3 blog aggregator set up in 2005. The Hype Machine collates recommendations and posts from the ‘blogosphere’ so users have an up-to-the-minute snapshot of what people are talking about and listening to. In theory, it’s a fantastic tool; in reality, it’s so bleeding-edge it will make you feel depressingly out of touch within minutes. That said, it’s still an invaluable resource and another example of the collective power the Internet wields. As with the bloggers themselves, if all music is equally available, the cream should rise to the top and true innovation will be rewarded.

The Internet has changed the way we listen to and acquire music to such an extent that the musical landscape is now completely unrecognisable to that of two decades ago. The collaborative spirit of the Internet (embodied nowhere better than on Wikipedia) and almost universal access in the Western world mean that consumers are now just kids in a giant virtual playground. Right now, we’re making hay while the sun shines, and that hides something altogether more worrying lurking just beneath the surface - just how long can we go on like this? People will always listen to and make music, regardless of financial constraints, but what about the artists on the bottom rung of the ladder, those who are now embarking on a potential career in popular music? Has the Internet helped or hindered their chances?

Part 4: New Artists

In his book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell makes reference to what he calls the ‘10,000 hour rule.’ That is, to truly succeed in your chosen field, at least 10,000 hours of practice are required. Gladwell mentions The Beatles in his argument, citing their residences in both Liverpool and Hamburg as the period during which they perfected their craft. Although less well-trodden, the path to the top was much more rigid in The Beatles’ day: relentless touring and a canny choice of cover versions would build you a fan base, then release records as often as possible and tour some more. Of course, The Beatles broke the glass ceiling that had restricted all those that came before, and ended up re-writing the popular music rulebook, but their initial route to fame was still fairly conventional.

Nowadays, there are numerous ways of making it big, from televised talent shows to bedroom experimentalism. What all breaking acts will have in common though, is that the Internet will have somehow shaped their ascent to fame. Any artist worth their salt will now have, as a bare minimum, a MySpace page, and on top of that, depending on their tech-savvy, any or all of a blog, Facebook fan page, Twitter account, YouTube channel and dedicated website. Plus, thanks to sites such as SoundCloud and Divshare, it’s never been easier to share and distribute your music. Add to this the fact that sound creation and manipulation software is now readily available to all and we’re back to the common theme: the Internet has levelled the playing field and given everyone the same opportunities. Music Week writer and industry commentator Eamonn Forde has his reservations: “There’s just so much stuff out there, it’s impossible to actually hear all that because it used to be limited by resources. People had to find time to go to the studio or press up a demo CD, the cost barrier automatically weeded out the number of acts but now with GarageBand and ProTools and whatever else, people can record pretty decent sounding music for next to no money and distribute it free through SoundCloud or through MySpace or whatever else, so the overall amount of new music out there is doubling or tripling every year”.

All this must simply make it more difficult to stand out from the crowd. A few months back, I shared a lunchtime drink with rising London folk duo, The Momeraths. Comprised of friends Claire Heywood and Paolo Ruiu who met at Kingston University, The Momeraths have released EPs on indie labels, toured throughout England and seen some of their contemporaries go on to record full-length albums, but they’re finding out that the industry isn’t exactly forgiving. The pressures and commitments of band life mean they recently downsized from a quintet to the two-piece they are today, as Claire explains: “It’s easy for me and Paolo because of the way we live - we have very cheap rent. I work two days and Paolo does some teaching, and that leaves us the whole week to do whatever: rehearse, or record, or more band stuff. They were working full-time and had girlfriends so if they want to, say, go out for the evening and we have rehearsals it pulls on that as well. It’s just people wanting different things - you’re not the same at 25 as you are at 21.”

It sounds as though if you’re really committed to being an artist, sacrifices have to be made and you have to go the extra mile to set yourself apart from everyone else out there. The Momeraths are acutely aware of this, going so far as to hand-knit individual covers for the release of their first single, Crayon Colours. The recent boom in reissues has shown that there is a market for high-end physical products, normally purchased by die-hard fans of an established artist, but it’s a bold move for an up-and-coming artist. “[Because] you can hear music without buying it, you want to make that product special - like a knitted cover - hopefully that’ll be that extra little thing that makes it special to have that record. Whenever I buy a record, I like the personalisation of it,” explains Paolo.

So where does the Internet fit into all of this? In the 90s, it seemed you couldn’t buy a CD that didn’t contain a cardboard insert with pre-paid postage and a PO Box number promising regular updates about the act in question. For bigger artists, there may have even been a fan club and you could potentially meet other people who liked the band - imagine that! In 2011, any self-respecting artist is just the click of a button away. The Momeraths are regular users of the Internet: “[After] we do the busking, it’s the next port of call for people if they see you in the street”, explains Claire. “The next thing is to go on the website, download things, go onto MySpace and find out more. I used to blog a lot and then I didn’t for around five months and soon as I wrote one again, you see the stats of who’s looking at it, and on the first day there were around 90 people looking at it; you realise how important it is.”

In an age where we’re hungry for information on-demand, we expect our favourite bands to update us, to let us know when and where they’re touring, and give us previews of upcoming releases. The Internet can be a blessing and a curse for artists; it’s a fantastic way to interact with fans but those same fans have come to expect more. The artist who gives away the most for free in an attempt to connect is the winner in the short-term, but converting that into money in the bank down the road is still the principal aim. While services such as Spotify may extend an artist’s reach, the rates paid for a stream are minimal.

Whether it’s magazines, writing, listening or creating, it seems the Internet has changed the world of music completely. Its ethos means that the consumer is put first, and that’s a welcome shift in power after decades of the industry being in charge. But, as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility, and there is a danger that we, the public, are gorging ourselves silly without stopping to consider the long-term consequences. What’s simultaneously thrilling and terrifying is that no-one knows what’s going to happen and nobody has the answers. It’s likely that more magazines will fold, most blogs will come to nothing, physical music sales will dwindle and countless bands will toil to no avail. Those aren’t bold predictions, just a continuation of current trends, but as we head into 2011, the world of music is buzzing with possibility. The only thing we can be sure of is that whatever happens, good or bad, the Internet will be at the heart of it.