Hark! It’s The Harks, a Stockport-based work-in-progress currently offering two tracks to download for free from their myspace. I was pointed towards these and asked for my opinion. Here goes…

It wasn’t the most exhilarating of starting points; a drab myspace, the usual moody group shots, a pretty dry biography. I was prepared for forgettable, faintly emotional and poorly produced indie and ‘Last Call’ didn’t do a great deal to tackle my prejudices. The opening riff and the general starkness of the track reeked of a tamed Interpol with a swish of britpop not improving things, just localizing them.

I contemplated abandoning the review altogether after the opening bars of ‘I Know’ – its arpeggios hinted that some terrifyingly mediocre indie balladry might be following and I feared the worst. Imploring myself to keep listening, I was warmed when the wandering guitar was joined by a vocal straight from the glory days of 90s shoegaze. From there, as if my mind was being read, the opening soundscape stopped, chords and drums hit, and a song truly began.

Below the flat vocal and unfinished production of ‘I Know’ is the foundation of a classic pop song. The ‘I won’t be around’ refrain has an indie classicalism about it, staying with me and demanding replays. Goodness knows what it’ll do to teenage girls with crumbling relationships. Probably good things.

Download these tracks here.

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Location:Wiltshire UK

I am a solo performer/producer from a little Village called Tollard Royal. I produce all my music from my bedroom recording on a zoom H4 and putting all the sounds together on my laptop. Away from studio work I also have a live setup. I use an MPC, Kaoss Pad 3, Boss RC-50 looper and a wide variety of instruments that I bring in and out of soundscapes and loop based melodies.
I love making music. It would probably drown me If it could, but I try and keep my head above the flow. Just to keep myself in control of time. If I don’t I find myself surrounded by instruments but not able to record because the dawn corus is too loud and the fact that the sun is rising makes my feel ill. I get lost in another world when I am making music, sometimes I stay there for hours on end. Untill eventually I am forced back into reality by a sound that wasnt made by me. I dont feel these hours are wasted. If anything there some of the best hours of my life. But there also the shortest. The world is an incredible place and has so much to offer. I realised a few years ago that I don’t think I could ever be truly sad because there is always something far bigger and more incredible than anything I could be sad about. My life is quite pleasant though. So I could understand if you can’t relate. Its just, trees, to me are enough to keep me smiling forever. When I make a piece of music that I think matches what I think about trees, I will have got as far as I can get musically. Please enjoy my explorartion untill that point.

My website: www.memotonemusic.blogspot.com
My myspace: http://www.myspace.com/williamyatesmusic.

[Edit: memotone is James' (our support engineer) favourite artist on RouteNote after the Bloody Tentacles (his own band)]

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LOCATION: West Sussex

Jeni Saint’s sound is a modern take on the classic singer-songwriter mould. Inspired by the likes of Carole King, Karen Carpenter and Kate Bush, Jeni uncovers stories hidden in everyday life and gives them a soundtrack.

Produced by Full Phatt’s Matt Ward (Usher, Mutya Buena, The Saturdays), Life On A Wire is a piano led track backed by the wonderful ‘Dirty Pretty Strings’ (Goldfrapp, KT Tunstall).

Classically trained on piano and cello, Jeni started composing in her early teens and won the BBC’s Song For Christmas competition at the age of 15. A prestigious gong, of which Gary Barlow is a previous winner!

Following a music degree at Oxford University, Jeni played her early songs on the London acoustic circuit at established venues such as The Troubadour, The 12-Bar and The Cobden Club.

She was one of the first acoustic artists to play at The Big Chill Festival with a solo voice and cello set. Jeni also performed on stage with Tom Middleton & Pete Lawrence and features on the Big Chill album, ‘Glisten’.

As a cellist, Jeni has appeared on tracks for Robbie Williams and Mutya Buena. She has arranged strings for Indie band Colour of Sound and Universal artist Elan Lea.

In 2003, Jeni decided to broaden her knowledge of the music industry and took a job as a TV plugger for Atlantic records. She helped to launch artists such as James Blunt, Sean Paul, Mark Ronson & Paolo Nutini amongst others.

Leaving London to focus on her own music, Jeni is now based down on the south coast.

WEBSITE

www.myspace.com/jenisaint

VID LINK FOR ‘Life On A Wire’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH_3U4G8DGI

Give It All Away by user309147

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Bankrupt proved an apt moniker for Hungary’s most unique punk rock band. With the country celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Iron Curtain’s demise teetering at the edge of bankruptcy, it’s hard to imagine a more fitting soundtrack than Razor Wires And Neon Lights, the band’s 5th release. (Available on iTunes through RouteNote)

“Wave Of Bankruptcy” kicks the door in with some unrelenting crisis rocknroll, to be followed by a punkabilly postcard from a hopeless place, “Agony Bay”. The ’77-style punk rock of “Parallel Worlds” was inspired by disappointment over the East-West division’s survival even 2 decades after the fall of communism in Europe. The uptempo “Lonesome Trains” is a snapshot of the Dec 2008 Hungarian railway strike, where thousands of people were unable to join their families for Christmas due to no means of transport. Leaving politics aside, the last third of the EP starts with “No Surrender” a bittersweet pop-punk tune about not giving up your rockandroll dreams. “Independent Girl” is a beefed-up re-recorded version of an old favorite from Bankrupt’s 2000 debut album, Listen, which leaves you asking for more.

Lyrically more mature, soundwise more versatile, Razor Wires and Neon Lights is more than a worthy follow-up to last year’s critically acclaimed Rocket To Riot City.

Inspired by the best moments of punk rock history, Budapest based three-piece Bankrupt deliver a unique blend of oldschool and newschool melodic punk rock, tinged with some punkabilly, rockandroll punk, and garage rock. Regardless of what hype is going on right now on what was earlier called the punk rock scene, Bankrupt stick to the music they like, and continue writing songs that sound the way punk rock was meant to be.

Bankrupt is proud to have supported acts like the Toy Dolls (UK), The Creepshow (CAN), The Real McKenzies (CAN), and many others.

Website: http://www.bankrupt.hu/

MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/bankrupt

Videos:

Cinderella – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRff_0TK_v4

Straight Outta Graceland – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHlTLOnYbXc

[Edit - We like these guys, not only because Simon Z in our office is Hungarian, but because they sound a bit like Green Day before they went all poppy.]

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A 3 piece consisting of guitar, vocals, bass and alsorts of percussion including tablas.  Musically, we aim for a different type of sound based on merging styles together, so as to have a European edge to our new folk pop genre.  Each member of the band has their own influences which instead of clashing, complement the music.  From Suzanne Vega to Peter Gabriel to Steely Dan.

Our ambition is to go as far as we are able.  We do not have a record label, and yet do not let this hold us back. After much searching for the best distributor we found ‘Routenote’ [ Edit: Thanks Rachel ] and are now awaiting the release of our first album ‘TeaTime Assorted sessions’ in many of the major online stores. (this will be sometime in November).

So far we have travelled up and down the country gigging, and have played many main cities including Edinburgh, London, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, and Leeds.  We have performed on local radio, and were recently included in Manchester’s ‘Chimp’ magazine in the ‘Up for Grabs’ unsigned section, described as ‘a Class act’.

We have included a link to our you tube video of ‘Tick Tock’.  While we feel that the song has a catchy hook with a continental feel, it was filmed in our Northwest countryside featuring Rivington of Horwich, Boltons spooky but marvelous ‘Pigeon Tower’.

Our Myspace page:

http://www.myspace.com/racheljamesandband

Our You Tube music video of ‘Tick Tock’:

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Will Wiesenfeld is a songwriter working in a decidedly more experimental medium. His lyrics, sounds, and melodies are emotionally honest and distinctly his own, but come from a diverse range of influences, namely Björk, cartoons, men, The National, Japan, the internet, David O’ Reilly, the movie Primer… His inspiration comes from a constant longing for something far more fantastic than suburban life, and he is able to express those sentiments through music.

He composes everything by himself in his bedroom, but is overly eager to share his bizarre universe with the rest of us.

www.myspace.com/postfoetus

[Edit - we're quite fond of Will's stuff in the RouteNote office]

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These lawsuits culminated in Napster’s bankruptcy, and its purchase at the bankruptcy auction by Roxio (of CD burning fame) – who have converted it into a subscription streaming service. Users can pay GBP£5 a month for unlimited streams from Napster’s 8 million strong catalogue, plus 5 tracks to download and keep as MP3s. There’s also the option to buy download tracks on an a-la-carte basis once you’re subscribed. In addition to this, Napster also provides a free streaming site, with limited functionality, and access to three quarters of its catalogue. Users can’t make playlists from this site, and it’s a lot slower and harder to use than the subscription platform.

The subscription service is cheaper than Spotify Premium or eMusic, its closest competitors in terms of service, and the fact that all of Napster’s members are subscribers makes it’s income much more reliable than the advertising based model that still makes up the bulk of Spotify’s trading, (the Economist reported that only 40,000 of the 6 million users who had downloaded the free platform have subscribed to the premium service) and thus better able to provide a steady income to it’s contributing artists, were it not for the odd addition of it’s free streaming service to the mix. Napster’s operations seem a little confused, different elements pulling in different directions from one another; a steady income from the subscription service, with a clunky ad supported option detracting from it; a limited MP3 download service clashing with both and yet failing to make it easy for users to take music away from their PC’s. If they could centralise all of these elements into a neat platform and make it easy to use, they’d have a model that looked a bit like Spotify’s, but it’s yet to be seen whether that can be turned into a profitable business in the long term.

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Combined with the iPod, Apple’s online music store must be one of the biggest success stories on the net. They were surprisingly late on the scene; MP3’s were invented way back in 1991, eMusic’s first incarnation was born in 1998 , and the iTunes store didn’t go live until April 2003 (a year and a half after the iPod launched). Five years later, in April of ’08, iTunes overtook Wal-Mart to become the biggest music retailer in the USA, and was reported by Reuters as selling over 70% of all digital music worldwide. The IFPI calculated the global digital market as worth USD$3783.8 billion in 2008 – conflating these figures means the iTunes store turned over $2648.66 billion on music alone: by their own report, they sold 2 billion songs worldwide between January 15^th 2008 and January 6^th 2009 – OK, so the IFPI comparison gives them more than a dollar a track per sale, which isn’t the case, but the figures aren’t entirely disparate.

Here’s a breakdown (drawn from Apples published stats) of how music sales have accelerated for Apple over the last 6 and a bit years:

To save you the horror of another of my poorly structured Excel ’03 graphs – here’s one lifted from the very informative Wikipedia page that unfortunately only covers the trend up to 6billion tracks. (If anyone can recommend a better program for graphing, please tell me in the comments!)

The success of their online proposition has been underpinned by the massive success of the iPod – over 218 million units have now been sold, meaning that the average iPod owner would only need to have bought 40 tracks from the iTunes store to account for all sales. That’s less than 4 albums worth each, and I think I probably have a few hundred albums in my collection.

iPod Sales by Quarter

Unless you’re a pretty hardcore nerd, you’ll be forced to manage your iPod through iTunes, and that shop is just so conveniently placed within the same piece of software that it’s easy to see how those track sales figures come about. Even accounting for a decent percentage of hardware failures, obsolescences and droppings into a pint of beer for those iPods out there (yes, I have had all of these happen), the iTunes captive audience (don’t forget all those iMac and Macbook users) is still 150 million strong and buying hard.

Track prices are relatively high, with occasional offers and a regular set of free sample downloads from artists promoting themselves. Apple users don’t seem to mind this, and it translates into pretty good profitability for artists selling through iTunes, 65% of the revenue from each sale is piped on down to the provider of the tracks sold, and there’s no variability in per track income as with the ad-supported streaming services. RouteNote can get your music on itunes without you having to pay anything up front.

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***EDIT***

Just to respond to that comment: a totally unfair comparison of someone who happened to be on Insound’s MP3 download front page when I looked, The Castanets, shows their album ‘Texas Rose…’ as being $1.50 cheaper on Amazon ($8.99) than on Insound ($10.49). Please feel free to refute me with your own research. I think Insound might deserve the extra money for taking an active interest in the bands they promote, and I hope they pass on more $ to their artists, but as a straight comparison, Amazon is cheaper (admittedly this is only one example).

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