Produced by Bosco Mann and recorded on an Ampex eight-track tape machine by Gabriel Roth in Daptone Records’ House of Soul studios, this record drips with a warmth and spontaneity rarely found since the golden days of Muscle Shoals and Stax. Sharon’s raw power, rhythmic swagger, moaning soulfulness, and melodic command set her firmly alongside Tina Turner, James Brown, Mavis Staples, and Aretha as a fixture in the canon of soul music. From the lushPhilly-Soul fanfare that ushers in “The Game Gets Old” at the top of the record, to the stripped down Sam Cooke-style“Mama Don’t Like My Man” at the tail, the Dap-Kings dance seamlessly through both the most crafted and simple arrangements with subtlety and discipline. I Learned the Hard Way is the “Daptone Sound” at its finest.
With suspiciously good timing as the Digital Economy Bill is hurried along towards becoming law, the National Association of Recording Merchandisers has issued a white paper outlining their recommendations for the development and standardisation of deliverable media and information collection. Essentially aimed at people like us (digital music distributors, that is), record labels, online music stores, that sort of thing, not exactly light reading, but interesting if you want to keep an eye on the future of the digital music industry.
The document can be downloaded by handing over your email through the widget below (powered rather pleasingly by Topspin media)
The White Paper details historical information on standardization both within the music industry and in other industries, along with member-identified and prioritized issues surrounding identification and communications standards for music release metadata. It is intended to provide an understanding of the core issues currently undermining accurate and efficient delivery of music information and music. It also features recommendations regarding how NARM will work strategically address these topics.
The story of’s EMI’s purchase, and the company’s subsequent struggles to maintain its debt is one that we’ve featured a fair bit, and now the speculation about their move to raise cash by licensing out their publishing division to another label is becoming clearer. According to an article in The Times they’ve been in talks with all three of the other major labels (UMG, Warner, Sony BMG) about taking over the exploitation of their catalogue for a five year period, for a sum in the neighbourhood of $400 million. This would essentially solve their cash flow problems (The Times thinks until about 2014), but would also mean that the major source of revenue had been taken out of the business.
Buying breathing space with a deal like this would give them time to make economies and find alternative sources of revenue without CitiBank breathing down their neck, but would probably also see one of their competitors releasing compilations like crazy, milking whatever they can out of the asset in their short license period. Doubtless EMI think this is a better solution than being thrown to the wolves that are gathering outside Brook Green – KKR, a private equity group, is in talks with Warner Music to launch a break-up bid for EMI.
As most people know OK Go is no longer part of EMI as they have been having a big disagreement about their music videos being embedded. OK Go’s latest video “This Too Shall Pass” hit about 3.5 million views.
It appears that OK Go is enjoying the independence because they have just created a video called Business Meeting where the band is meeting “with the heads of their new label to discuss their options.” It turns out their new label heads are a couple of dogs with clothes on. This could be OK Go’s latest viral video.
Guy Hands and his team at the high flying venture capital firm Terra Firma have been chewing sour grapes ever since their purchase of recording giant EMI for £2.4 billion. They have been in court with their lenders Citibank over bad advice during the sale of the label, and have been practically walking on water to meet the huge cash demand of the interest payments on their gigantic loan (although they stopped short of selling off the Abbey Rd. Studios to get a cash fix). Now they are again scrabbling around to find £120 million to plug a covenant breach on the same loan, and a deal is in the offing from WMG to buy the still-profitable music publishing arm of EMI, an asset it’s been coveting over the garden fence for decades. Any bid for the £1.2 billion publishing arm is probably going to be made after EMI have cleared or defaulted on their next interest payment, in the first case, making an offer to EMI and Terra Firma, and in the second, talking to their creditor Citi if the company goes into receivership.
The not-so-cherubic singer has signed with music investment group Power Amp, a fund that specialises in “providing equitable finance for established artists to record and market new music.” The deal will provide her with the funds to record and produce a new album independently, in return for revenues from all aspects of Charlotte’s music career:
“Rather than investing in an artists record only, Power Amp invests in all areas of an artists career: recording, publishing, touring, merchandising and sponsorship etc.”
Which sounds pretty much like a 360 deal to us. Madonna’s got one, so why shouldn’t Charlotte Church? She’s quoted on the FT as saying:
‘[The deal] provides me with a financial commitment equivalent to that of a major record company but with a much greater degree of control and ownership over my career’
Fair enough, if you’ve got national profile and the experience of releasing an album with a major label under your belt – C.C. released her previous album with Sony BMG – and the trend certainly seems to be towards self releasing music and working with independent digital music distributors like us here at RouteNote, which we obviously welcome. At any rate, why Ms. Church needs to borrow the money from an investment group rather than funding herself is a little mysterious… Perhaps her fee for being a chat show host wasn’t quite as astronomically high as Clarkson’s.
We’re big fans of Fink, one of Ninja Tune’s artists – if you are too, then you’ll be interested to see that he’s got a free, previously unreleased download of a B-side track that didn’t make it onto ‘Sort Of Revolution’ up on his site at the moment. You will need to swap him your email for it though…
Ad-supported music and digital content service Guvera has set the date for going live in the States as 30th March. The service, named for the bloody-handed revolutionary icon Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara [wiki here, tl;dr we should all strive for personal fulfilment and be nice communists, but sometimes it's ok to shoot people in the head if they betray you] – aims to instigate a ‘revolution’ in the media industry by getting advertisers to pay for content delivered to consumers, who have chosen the advertiser whose branding they find least offensive/interruptive. This may not be quite the paradigm shift that they seem to think, but their beta service has been up and running for a couple of months in Australia now, and has been successful enough for them to roll out the full scale launch. They have deals in place with Universal Music Group, EMI Music and IODA offering consumers ‘free but paid for’ legal downloads from their full music libraries, but concerns abound as to whether they’ll be able to pay for them in the long term and on the grand scale that they hope for. Another streaming service in the States means that Spotify, bogged down making their platform profitable in Europe, will find the marketplace that bit more crowded if and when they finally get their stall laid out in the US, but they will have had the headstart in refining the user experience and gathering advertisers to their service. There is a future for online ad-supported music streaming, the appetite is strongly apparent, but it will be a hotly contested race to become the dominant provider, and Guvera have yet to prove themselves against the competition.
In a competition that opened on the 1st, Guitar Center is offering the chance to have Guns n’ Roses Slash write, record and perform on a 3 track EP with you. The prize is more than that:
· A 3-song E.P. produced by legendary producer Mike Clink (Guns N’ Roses, Megadeth, Mötley Crüe)
· Slash will write, record and perform on your single
· A management development deal with “The Collective” (the team behind Linkin Park, Slash & Avenged Sevenfold)
· Feature of your single on iTunes
· World-wide digital distribution of your music through Tunecore
· $10,000 Guitar Center shopping spree
· $10,000 in new gear and endorsement deals from Ernie Ball Music Man
· The opening slot on Slash’s Monster Energy Bash
· An editorial feature on your band in Guitar World magazine
Whether or not you think Slash will fit into your J-Pop band, or be able to enhance the sound of your folk band, the experience and connections of a man who’s been at the top of the music industry for the last 25 years is going to be invaluable, and the publicity generated from the win, let alone the efforts of the management team will push you into a new league. Submit your music through the competition website here. Just read that contract.
After the success of the Christmas No.1, Rage Against the Machine, anti-X-Factor facebook campaign, a lot of copycat campaigns have sprung up attempting to achieve the same effect, and get specifically unknown music into the charts. The most ambitious of them has got to be ‘Storm The Charts’, which intends to place an indie musician at each slot of the UK Top 40. Currently the mainstream charts are devoid of ‘interesting’ music not becuase music fans don’t buy music, but because their tastes are far more varied than those of the people that buy chart music; those who are swayed by the marketing methods of the Big 4, and what’s pumped (pimped) through the TV on a Saturday night. Bringing disparate fans together for high profile campaigns is only a short term ‘statement’ trying to get the attention of the industry and asking them to pay more attention to smaller artists, but it’s hard to see how the major labels can defocus their marketing budgets and make the same kind of impact for a wider range of smaller acts. Nevertheless, it’s something we’d like to see happen, and if enough noise is made, then it might further persuade the industry that the broadening of music consumption that is apparent online should be mirrored in the mainstream. This would have the knock on effect of encouraging them in their efforts to monetise content online, and mean that we’re all more likely to see viable legal alternatives to the file-sharing that’s so widely prevalent, and widely blamed for causing the steep decline in physical sales.
The fabulously soulful Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings just played at NPR’s SXSW showcase, and are streaming their new album ‘I Learned The Hard Way’ for free through the NPR website. These guys knock Amy Winehouse into a cocked hat, and have a richness and fidelity of sound that has come straight from the seventies. For the purists among you, there’s an LP available from their record label’s online store here. Here’s why they think you should buy their album:
