What a start to the year.
So I come back into the office, a handful of days after my second daughter is born and discover that things are going to be even tougher this year than they were last year. My friend who runs a PR company has given me some space in his office to use while we kickstart the management company. One of the fringe benefits of this, I've discovered, is that he always knows news stories ahead of them breaking in the papers. So before the wires were sizzling, Andy says to me: "Happy New Year? Not at EMI. It's going to be carnage" And it was.
Before EMI employees had fully recovered from their Christmas splurge or even plonked down in front of their computers to greet 2008, one of their biggest artists Robbie Williams went to the press saying he's 'going on strike'. And contained in the body of the Times piece which appeared on 11 January was the bombshell that 'massive layoffs' were about to happen.
And sure enough, the following Monday, Guy Hands, director of Terra Firma, the private equity company that now owns EMI, told his assembled staff that there will be job cuts of up to 2000.
I looked that figure up online just now and the first news link I got - a BBC one - gave me the headline EMI announces 1,800 job cuts. Funny, I thought, I was under the impression that it wasn't a specific number - that Hands had only given a ballpark figure of 1500 to 2000 redundancies, roughly a third of the international EMI workforce. But then I noticed the date on the feature - 20 March 2002! The story was about the cuts about to be made by then-chairman Allain Levy to try and save the 'financially indebted company'. Plus ca change. Mind you, back then they could at least claim that it was Mariah Carey's fault. They'd just spent £38 million quid getting out of their deal with her which had gone - and here the expression takes on a deeply significant meaning - tits up. In 2002, the 1800 figure was a fifth of EMI's workforce. Now the 2000 cut represents a third. So in five years the workforce will have gone from 10,000 to 4000! Er, why I am attempting to remain in the music business? This thought wafts over my horizon as I take a call from the studio where one of our band rehearses and discover I owe them £253. How am I going to make that back, let alone £38 million?
A friend of mine who works for EMI phoned me up over the Christmas break. Like me, he enjoys writing and he'd spent his festive period writing a bullet-point guide on how to save the record industry. He was probably fearing for his job - unnecessary in my opinion as he's one of the few undeniably successful members of staff. Christ, if he feels insecure imagine what the rest of the building is like. So he'd had a go at this analysis of where the record business had all gone wrong and what should be done about it. It was a letter he planned to send to Music Week, a kind of music biz variation on a letter to The Times. It was doomed to failure. There is no step by step guide to solving the current conundrum which is that people can copy and duplicate their own music from friends or file sharing . Record industry currency - the finished, mastered, shiny new product is now only distinguishable from what we can burn at home in that it has artwork, and sometimes that means a 'four page booklet' which is a piece of folded paper with the artist's name printed on the front and a tracklisting on the back. And the kids don't even want artwork! We do, us middle -aged men, the ones who got a whiff of new wave, or new romanticism or even got off our mash at Shoom - we want artwork, we demand packaging. I want the box set of Pink Floyd albums in replica sleeves. DON'T ASK ME WHY! I just like artwork and packaging. But if I was 15, I wouldn't give an arctic monkeys, I'd download the whole lot overnight, and spend the money on trainers and cider.
In his letter, my pal- like me, an A&R person - put faith in 'making great records' and to a large extent I agree with this. He proposed that a certain album that is currently selling really well, a CD that was one of the few 'must-haves' in 2007 is a record without a single duff track on it and that's why it's doing so well. Make records like this, my friend argued, and people will buy them. The problem is that most albums are, to quote my mate Sarah Cawood, "Two killers, the rest of it fillers." And now, given that we can get the two killers for the princely sum of £1.58 on iTunes, why should we pay a tenner for the rest of it in a plastic box? Oh, and it was Amy Winehouse's album which my mate was going on about, which, say what you want about the smack-taking, is an unarguably palatable record. Better than Mika's anyway.
So do I expect to make equally thrilling records with the artists I manage? Here's what I think: Always expect the least expected thing. I don't know if I appropriated that bit of unhelpful wisdom or whether it's based on my own A&R experiences but I know that it is pretty much always the case in the music business. No one wanted Radiohead apart from Keith Wozencroft - at EMI incidentally. Why? Because the singer had a wonky eye, their songs were so-so, and crucially, they were all different heights! Imagine the Beatles or the Stones if there'd been a really tall one and a really short one! Riddiculous! Like Radiohead were ever going to happen! Last year, everyone, every single record company and publisher were queuing up to sign a certain female singer. She was feted; wined and dined, and everyone thought that signing her was, in current industry parlance, a 'no brainer' A friend of mine in music publishing asked her what she wanted out of a career in music and rather than saying, 'artistic satisfaction', or 'to get my songs heard', or even 'to get laid by skinny-trousered Camden pretties', she was honest and said, "A Coutts bank account'. Her record bombed and I suspect she's still with Nat West.
So the swan who signs for millions will frequently end up in the bargain bin, whilst the ugly duckling, who a solitary A&R person begrudgingly does a development deal with, frequently blossoms into a million seller. How's that for a January mixed metaphor?
So I make no expectations on my charges. We're just getting them to write the best songs they can And with that in mind, we've decided it's time to do some recordings ...
Monday, 28 January 2008
Friday, 28 December 2007
The Who, the What and the Why
Who
My name is Ben Wardle and I’ve worked in music for most of my life without being a musician. I've been an A&R man for record companies, you see. A&R, for those of you that don’t know, stands for Artists & Repertoire: the job of finding and developing new talent.
I’ve signed and worked with a few artists you may have heard of and quite a lot you've definitely never heard of. It's a brilliant job if you're being successful and the worst job in the world when no one is buying your records. Watching a band I looked after supporting REM at Milton Keynes was a treat; having to tell one of favourite artists that he was dropped, was not. I once signed a band, whose drummer tried to flush the freshly drawn-up contract down the loo, and I once sat in the living room of the drunken singer from one of the UK's biggest bands as he played me his songs and the songs of one of a rival band on his piano and ranted about how they had ripped him off.
Eventually I got fed up with it all and tried to escape the music business. The first thing I did was help compile a dictionary of quotations for a big publisher but my natural tendency for making things up won out: one of the quotations I invented (from Ernest Hemingway) made it into the finished book. I decided to carry on writing and went on to co-author the Virgin Guide to Music on the Web, which now probably reads like an pictogram on a cave wall. After that, I became an online entertainment editor for six years. But, despite trying to focus on Film and Books and Theatre, I found myself eventually dealing exclusively in music-related features and in the end I gave it up and came back to A&R. I'm still writing though, and I'm hoping my latest, Pink Flag, will get a 3 For 2 in Waterstones any day now ...
Where
I live in Walthamstow, London with my wife, our four-year-old daughter Madeleine, my brand new daughter, Esther (born on January 8th!) and our one-eared cat, Tigger. I’m sure there must be some conclusion to be drawn from my cat’s auditory want and my career but I’ll leave you to draw it.
What
I’m starting again. You've probably read about the demise of the record-selling business recently - Radiohead letting people pay what they want for their album, Madonna signing to a ticketing business, Robbie going on strike etc. But of course there are other casualties - the people who work for the companies. My last employer, V2, was bought in October by Universal and myself and the rest of the staff were made redundant. Soon a similar thing will happen to EMI and there are rumours about Sony/BMG and Universal.
So am I leaving the music biz? Am I going to try and get a job in a more robust industry than the fickle world of rock and pop? Maybe British Rail or the NHS? Hell, no! To paraphrase Village People, I can't stop the music, I can't leave it alone. And as I hit my 44th year on the planet, I've decided to set up my own music business, to become - or attempt to become - self-employed in rock.
As 50 begins to raise its wrinkly forehead over the horizon, I've decided to manage a band of five 20-something girls from Swindon as well as four art-school boys from Glasgow. Yes, I'm very aware, given the current climate in the music industry, of the idiocy of this- but despite it all, I feel hugely optimistic.
Why?
Why do I feel optimistic? I have no idea. I'm normally a devout glass-half-empty merchant. Perhaps I"m having some sort of manic episode ... No, the truth is, A&R people, contrary to the common perception, are mainly naive fools who have an almost religious faith in the power of music. And you know what? I think the bands we're working with are really good and stand every chance of being successful.
So why write a blog? "I’ll never write a blog," I said about four months ago," they’re invariably written by self-obsessed pub bores, who assume that everyone is interested in their tedious opinions.” I don’t necessarily feel any different now; a lot of blogs do seem to be terribly narcissistic, but I now see the point of them: if you have something meaningful going on, then it helps to write about what happens just to make sense of it all. So rather than writing in a diary that goes under my pillow never to be seen by anyone until I die, at which point some indifferent grandchild reads a paragraph from it before putting it straight in the recycling bin – rather than this, why not do it online so others can read about all the mistakes I’m making and maybe give me some advice?
So there it is, the who, the what and the why. And when, what about when?
Ah, that'd be now
My name is Ben Wardle and I’ve worked in music for most of my life without being a musician. I've been an A&R man for record companies, you see. A&R, for those of you that don’t know, stands for Artists & Repertoire: the job of finding and developing new talent.
I’ve signed and worked with a few artists you may have heard of and quite a lot you've definitely never heard of. It's a brilliant job if you're being successful and the worst job in the world when no one is buying your records. Watching a band I looked after supporting REM at Milton Keynes was a treat; having to tell one of favourite artists that he was dropped, was not. I once signed a band, whose drummer tried to flush the freshly drawn-up contract down the loo, and I once sat in the living room of the drunken singer from one of the UK's biggest bands as he played me his songs and the songs of one of a rival band on his piano and ranted about how they had ripped him off.
Eventually I got fed up with it all and tried to escape the music business. The first thing I did was help compile a dictionary of quotations for a big publisher but my natural tendency for making things up won out: one of the quotations I invented (from Ernest Hemingway) made it into the finished book. I decided to carry on writing and went on to co-author the Virgin Guide to Music on the Web, which now probably reads like an pictogram on a cave wall. After that, I became an online entertainment editor for six years. But, despite trying to focus on Film and Books and Theatre, I found myself eventually dealing exclusively in music-related features and in the end I gave it up and came back to A&R. I'm still writing though, and I'm hoping my latest, Pink Flag, will get a 3 For 2 in Waterstones any day now ...
Where
I live in Walthamstow, London with my wife, our four-year-old daughter Madeleine, my brand new daughter, Esther (born on January 8th!) and our one-eared cat, Tigger. I’m sure there must be some conclusion to be drawn from my cat’s auditory want and my career but I’ll leave you to draw it.
What
I’m starting again. You've probably read about the demise of the record-selling business recently - Radiohead letting people pay what they want for their album, Madonna signing to a ticketing business, Robbie going on strike etc. But of course there are other casualties - the people who work for the companies. My last employer, V2, was bought in October by Universal and myself and the rest of the staff were made redundant. Soon a similar thing will happen to EMI and there are rumours about Sony/BMG and Universal.
So am I leaving the music biz? Am I going to try and get a job in a more robust industry than the fickle world of rock and pop? Maybe British Rail or the NHS? Hell, no! To paraphrase Village People, I can't stop the music, I can't leave it alone. And as I hit my 44th year on the planet, I've decided to set up my own music business, to become - or attempt to become - self-employed in rock.
As 50 begins to raise its wrinkly forehead over the horizon, I've decided to manage a band of five 20-something girls from Swindon as well as four art-school boys from Glasgow. Yes, I'm very aware, given the current climate in the music industry, of the idiocy of this- but despite it all, I feel hugely optimistic.
Why?
Why do I feel optimistic? I have no idea. I'm normally a devout glass-half-empty merchant. Perhaps I"m having some sort of manic episode ... No, the truth is, A&R people, contrary to the common perception, are mainly naive fools who have an almost religious faith in the power of music. And you know what? I think the bands we're working with are really good and stand every chance of being successful.
So why write a blog? "I’ll never write a blog," I said about four months ago," they’re invariably written by self-obsessed pub bores, who assume that everyone is interested in their tedious opinions.” I don’t necessarily feel any different now; a lot of blogs do seem to be terribly narcissistic, but I now see the point of them: if you have something meaningful going on, then it helps to write about what happens just to make sense of it all. So rather than writing in a diary that goes under my pillow never to be seen by anyone until I die, at which point some indifferent grandchild reads a paragraph from it before putting it straight in the recycling bin – rather than this, why not do it online so others can read about all the mistakes I’m making and maybe give me some advice?
So there it is, the who, the what and the why. And when, what about when?
Ah, that'd be now
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