This coincides nicely with a lecture I gave this evening at Westminster University to a group of MA Music Business Management students.
In an interview with Paul Morley, Brian Eno says:
“I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn’t last, and now it’s running out. I don’t particularly care that it is and like the way things are going.
“The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you’d be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history’s moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it.’’
(Via Pete.)
Tagged: Media, records
- Published:
- January 18, 2010 – 11:02 pm
- Author:
- By Dubber
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The team at New Music Strategies
For the past few years, New Music Strategies has been a blog about music on the internet. And the need for me to do that has changed as time has gone on.
As I’ve hinted over the past couple of months, it’s time for a transformation – and New Music Strategies is becoming something new.
Today in a city called Groningen in the north of the Netherlands, I brought together a small group of some of the finest minds in music and culture in Europe (who also happen to be some of my favourite people), and together we formed a new company under the New Music Strategies banner.
We are equal partners in the business, and we all have different skills and expertise. We’ll introduce the members of the team soon, but I thought this would be a good moment to explain who we are and what we do.
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Tagged: business
- Published:
- January 15, 2010 – 5:17 pm
- Author:
- By Dubber
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Hi. How’s it going?
I’ve been getting some emails recently from worried New Music Strategies readers. Some of them asking after my health (there’s nothing wrong with my health – but people assume the worst), and others prompting for a return to the blog so they can read more content.
It’s been a good couple of months since I wrote anything at all here – and longer since I did so with any regularity.
Well, I have some good news, and some other good news.
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- Published:
- November 9, 2009 – 4:20 pm
- Author:
- By Dubber
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Islet live. Photo by @edhombre
I’m at Un-Convention in Swansea this weekend. Lots of talk with lots of interesting people about the independent and grassroots DIY music sector. It’s held in a cafe/bar called Monkey in the central city, and in the evening, bands play.
I’m here with a bunch of people I know from these sorts of things – and I’ve been spending a fair bit of time hanging with the very clever Ben Walker (@ihatemornings), who you know as the guy who wrote the Twitter song.
One band played last night that blew me away. And I don’t just mean I liked them, or really loved their gig. They BLEW. ME. AWAY. I can’t remember being this excited by a band in years. Possibly decades.
Ben was excited too. We came back downstairs, had a beer, and raved about how amazing they are. We were instant fans. So we went straight online and looked them up.
We Googled: “Islet band Cardiff” and various other combinations of the band name and their city of origin. Nothing. They’d played one support gig for Shonen Knife (how cool is that?!) – but no website, no MySpace, no nothing.
And we were stuck. They had no CDs for sale. Nothing we could do. We just didn’t know how to be Islet fans.
So we made them a fan site…
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- Published:
- September 5, 2009 – 5:07 pm
- Author:
- By Dubber
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