I stand (well, sit, slightly reclining to be more accurate) before you a broken man. But I laugh in the face of addiction and say to you all now I will fight this blight and become, once again, the man I once was. My name is Alex, and I am a scrobble-aholic!

It all started so innocently, I mean, what self respecting music fan wouldn’t jump at a service that logs all the music you listen to? We refer to this filthy habit as ‘scrobbling’ and it has the potential to take over your life.

I began my ascent into scrobble addiction on the 22nd January 2007 with just a few scrobbles, just to see what it was about and to feel part of the crowd. It took a while for the addiction to really take hold, but within 6 months, I was logging in daily, often several times a day to satisfy my cravings.

The scrobble addiction is a pernicious beast. My music is important to me, and what I listen to on a daily basis is an expression of this. Keeping a log of what I listen to, over time, is like keeping a diary – a little expression of my inner self, and a document of my moods and tastes. To have this for myself is a wonderful thing, but my last.fm playlist is public, and that’s where the trouble starts. The concept of someone knowing exactly what I’ve been listening to and appraising it is an uncomfortable one for me. I pride my self (rightly or wrongly) as being open minded and having a diverse music taste. I’m happy with this conviction/delusion and the last thing I want is for someone to barge in and scupper my self-satisfactory conceit. But my playlist is out there, and public, so that’s exactly what could happen.

You can see the levels of paranoia that this foul addiction has driven me to? Is there really an elite of musically diverse fanatics out there queuing up to take their shot? These people certainly exist (I am one of them), but could they give a badger’s testicle about me? I think not. But the paranoia persists. For this reason I don’t friend people on last.fm, I attempt to remain on a happy island – an island like the Galapagos, diverse and special and protected. Stay of my land!

So at this point, my addiction and the accompanying neuroses were under control. I had a manageable addiction that wasn’t affecting my daily life, but like all addictions it developed and spiralled. Here we come to the second stage of scrobble addiction: taste distortion.

While opportunistically lingering around the various widgets and stats generators that gravitate round last.fm, looking for a stronger fix, I happened across a nasty concept called AEP. The Anti-Exponential Profile is an unsophisticated statistical algorithm that propounds to calculate your musical taste’s diversity. This uses your all time top 50 bands and the number of listens that they have, and give you an indication of skew – are you a fanboy for a particular band, or do you tend to spread it around a bit? This is a number between 1 and 5, where 5 is really diverse (the mythical state of having listened to everything an equal amount of times) and 1 (or below) means that you’ve listened to a few artists loads and not much else. In the AEP world of musical snobbery, 5 is ultimately virtuous, and 1 or less is slovenly, narrow minded, low-brow and reprehensible.

I ranked at something like 3.5, which is unacceptable. Utterly and totally. Un-accept-able.

The scene of the crime

Part of the problem was that, at that time, I’d spent rather a lot of time listening to The Dillinger Escape Plan’s latest album Ire Works, which has quite a lot of short songs and bears repeated listens. It had totally skewed by AEP! So I banned myself from listening to TDEP entirely until I’d got to at least and AEP 4. Why 4? Not just because it’s a nice round number, but once I achieved this number, I could join the last.fm group called “We don’t have exponential profiles” which is limited only to that elite of folks that have AEP’s of 4 or higher. I had to be a member of this group, not doing so, as soon as possible, would constitute absolute and total failure.

Soon I was policing the very music I was listening to. “Hmmm, feels like an Opeth moment” I would think to myself, but then, “hold on, no, listened to too much Opeth lately, it’s starting to skew my list, need to listen to something further down”. On other occasions: “Why is my AEP not moving? I know, if I listen to the stuff at the bottom of the list, then that should help even things out a bit, and by bottom end will be nearer to my top”.

Crises would occur frequently. Accidentally not syncing my iPod before listening to something on iTunes (and thus negating my ability to scrobble the tracks recently listened to on the iPod) would leave me in a seething rage. On occasion, I would accidentally leave my iPod playing over night. Once, right from the beginning, so my iPod thought I was on an AC/DC binge. This posed a horrible dilemma – do I sync the iPod and have my profile skewed towards AC/DC (clearly not what I’m into at the moment!) and see my AEP plummet, or do I not sync, and lose the ability to scrobble all the other tracks that I really did listen to before? No choice really, the AEP is paramount.

I finally achieve AEP 4 and hastily joined the elite group of anti-expontialers. Heaven. But was my appetite sated? No!

The next escalation came when I discovered a tool that calculated my “long tail”. Basically, the percentage of your overall scrobbles that were generated by bands not in the top 50. This is a further indication of musical diversity, and thus overall righteousness. Subsequent to finding out that my long tail was less than 50% (unthinkable!) I largely stopped listening to anything in my top 50 (still at around AEP 4), basically all my favourite bands.

This didn’t seem like utter madness to me until I started to have anxiety about Opeth (now way out front on my scrobble count), TDEP, Radiohead or anyone in my top 10 bands releasing new albums. Should I listen to these and run the risk of liking them, thus skewing my AEP?

Every recovering addict has a moment of self realisation – the pure moment where cold, hard reality floods in on you – and this was mine. This had to stop!

So here I am today. My last.fm account is still alive, but I have resolved to stop looking at it. Is this enough to break the cycle? Maybe not, after all I’m still scrobbling. Baby steps, and over time I’ll conquer this. I feel a sense of relief, but the urge to take a peep is sometimes overwhelming.

But has this changed me permanently? What exactly is my taste in music? How will I know if the stuff that thought I liked was not just a product of my addiction? Only time will tell I guess…

This has been very hard for me to write, but at the same time cleansing and cathartic. I hope others reading this who have suffered as I have are able to take some strength from my words – brothers and sisters, we can fight this together.

While on my recent excursion into the murky world of Drone (more on this to come, in about 3 years time, which is how long it’s going to take me to plough through Earth and Sunn O)))’s back catalogue) I briefly segued into classical choral music. It happened while I was watching BBC’s Classic Goldie, on which the Drum and Bass pioneer was saddled with the task of writing a piece of classical music to be preformed at that most British of institutions – The Proms. Part time graffiti artist Goldie, who cannot read or write music, is more accustomed to stringing together audio files in interesting configurations and certainly isn’t your obvious classical composer material. He makes a pretty decent job of it.

Anyway, somewhere along the lines he’s introduced to various, more experimental classical techniques by his mentor. One of these was an unearthly low pitch droning, oscillating hum made by a bunch of blokes with deep voices. Thought I “now this reminds me of early Earth sung by a bunch of blokes with deep voices” and trotted off gleefully to find out more.

It turns out to be the intro to a piece called Roncesvalles from Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles. Mr. Talbot was once a member of British, tongue-in-cheek Brit-pop band The Divine Comedy. He now composes classical music in multiple styles with various degrees of populist slant, and is perhaps best known for his work on movie soundtracks like Son of Rambow and (festering bucket of badger entrails mixed with camel saliva) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Path of Miracles is choral from beginning to end, with few other instruments other than the human voice. I know nothing at all about choral music, so I can’t tell you if this is a good or bad example of it, but it totally bowled me over. The intro to Roncesvalles alone is like nothing I’ve ever heard. This ethereal rising drone sends shivers up my spine. Path of Miracles is comprised of 4 pieces at around 15 minutes in length. It’s sung, at least in part, in English, although it appears to be centred around a trip through various French villages.

Atmospheric and brooding, this is dark stuff. At times spooky or down right scary (along the lines of Jerry Goldsmith’s Omen theme), at others majestic and exulting. There are a fair few parallels in these histrionic overtures with metal – doom, black, drone and even European power metal. However, there’s no sense of quasi-intellectual posturing or irony here, this is the genuine article. It’s complex and difficult, and will  no doubt take countless more listens before it really divulges its secrets.

There’s not much I can say that will do this justice. This is fascinating and powerful music. If you like your music dark and complex, then you should check it out.

Radiohead performed this hypnotic new track at Poelten Festival in Austria. It’s not a radical departure from their current sound, but it does stray into psychedelic territory with it’s repetitive reverberating groove. There’s probably a few more new tracks to come over the coming weeks on the European festival circuit and if they’re all recorded as well as this we’ll be able to piece the new album together! That said, you never know what they’re going to do with new tracks when they get into the studio. Compare the album version of Like Spinning Plates with the live version – they could be different songs. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, there’s never a dull moment with Radiohead.

<Edit Alex 24/08/2009 12:20 pm>

OK, so apparently I’m woefully behind the times. My Twisted Words was actually first unleashed on the world last week and subsequently claimed and ratified by Jonny Greenwood. It can be downloded here. Ateasweb.com, known for their affiliation with Radiohead speculated that this is part of a forthcoming EP named Wall of Ice and referred their readership to this domain, which was originally pointed at radiohead.com. A message has now been posted on that domain apparently rebutting their claims:

Don’t just publish bullshit only to get hits on your webpage.
Don’t just create your own stories after reading one post on a message board.

Get your facts straight.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=us&q=wallofice.com
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=wallofice.com

Whether this is a dead end or part of a wild goose chase is anyone’s guess – I’ll let Ateaseweb.com sort it out. One thing is for sure, Radiohead have made a career out of confounding, and nothing would suprise me…!

The Good

Devin Townsend nonchalantly Tweets:

@dvntownsend counting down…late nights, great progress…suddenly very happy about record 2. Released around Nov 20.

and unleashes more verbose psychobabble on the world:

Musically, ‘Addicted’ is along the lines of the big, wall-of-sound hard rock/heavy metal of Ocean Machine and (The Devin Townsend Project’s) ‘Accelerated Evolution’ — even Physicist at points. It is a very direct and ‘to-the-point’ album with an emphasis on groove and the chorus.

Exciting stuff, seriously. If it’s 1/10th as good as Terria or Accelerated Evolution, it’ll be amazing. Perhaps more tantalizing however is:

On other notes: I have been rehearsing with a new band, and we will start touring in early 2010, representing all the back catalogue of solo material, from ‘Ki’, ‘Addicted’, Physicist, Ziltoid, Terria, Ocean Machine, The Devin Townsend Band, Infinity etc… I have some big plans for this and rehearsals are sounding amazing. The touring entity will be called ‘Devin Townsend’ and is essentially a way for me to get out there and interact again and showcase 15 years of music that never really got its fair shake. We look forward to seeing you out there!

Yeah! You better be doing that in the UK Mr. Townsend!

Next – A new track released off of Megadeth’s anticipated new album:

Do I hear some leanings back to Countdown to Extinction days? Speed metal loveliness indeed!

Every Time I Die released another new track off of the forthcoming New Junk Aesthetic on their Myspace. This is a delightfully pleasant recording, but does anyone else notice a hint of a softer, more commercial sound seeping through? Could this be the beginning of a slippery slope for the southern hardcore mavericks?

This week I discovered that not all Metalcore sucks, with the introduction to my music vocabulary of Burnt by the Sun. Like a darker version of Hatebreed, they keep the breakdowns to a minimum and deliver top notch aggressive metal. I may even put on some big sunglasses and a fake beard (to wear over my real beard) and venture out surreptitiously to but a copy.

Other stuff keeping me happy:

• No Made Sense with their brutal progressive hardcore and stupid sounding album title
• Photonic, which has lead me to dust off various albums by Fugazi, Pavement and Guided by Voices
• Oceansize. Apparently they have an EP out soon.
• Earth. Slowly I’m getting my head around this most frustrating of bands. Albums Pentastar and Hex are simply beautiful but also infuriating.
• Revocation. Everyone is carping on about them like infatuated teenagers thanks to Cosmo Lee’s article suggesting that they may be the next great metal band. That’s probably going a bit far at this early stage, but they are pretty good. The guitar solo on Dismantle the Dictator is to die for. No doubt Metal Hammer will be forcing them down our throat for the next 3 years.

The Bad

Desparately naive wannabe journo’s laying into indisputably legendary bands like Black Sabbath. Why on earth would you write such an ill-informed bucket of badger shit is totally beyond me.

Music streaming site Spotify is part owned by the evil overlords of the music industry in an attempt to keep the site afloat in the face of pitiful advertising revenues and in lieu of paying out royalties to the record labels. If this isn’t depressing enough, it sounds like the artists aren’t getting any royalties either and are unlikely to see any dividends when some cash burdened corporate is stupid enough to buy this service which is as likely to see profit as I am likely to turn green and transform into a million dollar bill.

…and the Ugly

This dude bustin’ some classy moves. I have been known to do this after a couple of beverages, which is when it gets truly ugly.

The vast majority of unsigned bands out there are either shit, superfluous, disposable or just copies of another band. Unfortunately, the race for a record deal is usually won by those bands sprouting in the better watered plots, and the rest of the seedlings will wither and die – such are the strains of being in band. So when I come across a band that’s really decent but is lurking in the shady, untended parts of the musical garden I immediately get a bit nervous – if someone doesn’t sign them soon, they may stop what their doing and get a proper job, which would be very bad.

New Zealand’s Photonic are one such band. Photonic is really one guy called Craig. His music has nothing to do with much of the other music out there today. Somehow he has crafted a set of tracks that is both forward leaning and backward looking. It’s also totally unclassifiable.

So where do we start with this brilliant, self-published, motley collection of vignette’s and vast-scapes he’s dubbed Recorded Contact? First and foremost, this is not metal, at least for the most part. There’s no predominant style here other than perhaps sparse, indignant hardcore reminiscent of Fugazi with post-rock tendencies drifting into Mogwai territory. However, the spirit of this collection is as much rooted into the petulant lo-fi of 90’s alt icons like Pavement and Guided by Voices, and the psych-pop-metal of Pixies.

Photonic’s songs veer between half-complete ADHD experiments and fully formed post-rock mini-epics. Vocals sprinkle this album almost at random, and styles change mid-song. On the first couple of listens (and I’d listened to most of these tracks on the band’s Myspace, like, 5 times, before buying the album) you really don’t know what’s coming next.

The production is stripped back to the point of being resolutely lo-fi, which constitutes a sizeable chunk of this album’s charm. It’s difficult to tell whether this sound is intentional or the result of having too little wonga to afford a decent recording. However, let’s keep our man Craig away from Pro-tools lest he be tempted – the production here is just perfect as it is.

Photonic are another one of those bands that mix a bunch of my favourite styles in magical ways, but what an unexpected mix this is. It’s impossible to know where to place this within the modern skewed-spectrum of *cores. Craig describes Photonic as “a rock metal power-chord psychedelic beats party” and appears unable or unwilling to classify the band himself – indeed there is no-one else out there is recording music like this, at least to my knowledge. Given this, anyone who signs Photonic will be gambling on a band that damn near impossible to market. This is the travesty of the music industry, where conformity is rewarded and individuality is ignored.

Shit, someone better sign Photonic, otherwise I’ll start a record label and I’ll do it myself!

In the meantime, I implore you, give Photonic some of your money and time (check out most of the album on their myspace here). This seedling needs watering, as the world will be a duller place without it.

Another couple of UKMU unsigned reviews for your existential enrichment.

The brutal Skull of a Mammoth:

First impressions are deceptive. Skull of a Mammoth’s name lead me to expect lumbering doom laden metal. The bell chimes followed by eerie keyboards and owl toots of the first track here did nothing to dispel this and even conjured and air of Spinal Tap, or worse Bad News (“Bells don’t go dung, cows go dung!”). Oh dear, I thought, and braced myself for some cheese, only to be swiftly bludgeoned from my lazy reverie by a cannon ball sized chunk of Lamb of God style ferocity.

London’s Skull of a Mammoth are a curious mix. The vocals, and overall approach to stripped down, to the point brutality is resolutely Lamb of God, but these tracks effortlessly skip between Metalcore, Black Metal and Melodic Death.

Read more…

The burgeoning 15 Times Dead:

With a name like 15 Times Dead, I expected these guys would be another cookie cutter metal/death-core bands, so I was pleasantly surprised when a neatly packaged retro-thrash band tore its way out of the Myspace player.

What seems apparent from the recent revival of this revered sub-genre is that the hardcore elements that helped form the rudiments of this style are well represented (DRI, COC, Anthrax, Nuclear Assault), but the classic metal influence is less well represented (unless you count the endless power metal bands). This is perhaps because the big names on that edge are still going strong – namely Metallica and Megadeth. It’s certainly cool to be punking it up, but could it ever be cool to sound like Metallica when the beast lumbers on through varying levels of purist disrepute? This is perhaps why the labels aren’t clambering to sign up bands like 15 Times Dead.

That’s not to say that 15 Times Dead are a one trick pony. This music is deceptively diverse. The thrash masters are all here (Metallica, Anthrax and Testament seep through in varying levels) but there’s a grounding here in classic rock which is tempered by grunge and alternative flavours.

Read more…

This may be a “sure we all knew about this Alex, we were just keeping it a secret from you” moment, but it came as a surprise for me that there are no less than 2 rich digital media formats being touted to reinvigorate the ‘dying’ album format.

I hadn’t realised that the album had was dying – I still buy but most of my music either on CD or download whole albums. However much of the rest of the music buying world doesn’t – the trend is towards buying single tracks, and some bands have even opted to become singles only zones and eschew albums all together. After all, what’s the point of recording an entire, well packaged, sonically aligned collection, when most folks only ever download track 9 because they heard it on the radio?

It is for this reason that AC/DC refuse resolutely to (officially) release their music on digital format – we record albums, they say, not single tracks, and they’re made to be consumed that way. It’s not hard to see why they, and many other bands, feel this way.

The album frequently marks an epoch in time. “Here are 10 songs that represent this moment in our lives”, a distillation of their microcosmic zeitgeist if you will. All the best albums are comprised of tracks that feel like they really belong together, and they wouldn’t have sounded right on the previous or subsequent album. A poor album is often one that doesn’t gel. These are often albums made up of a mix of ‘singles’ or filler, and it’s perhaps these types of albums that no-one it mourning the death of.

Many albums are aligned on theme (Muse’s Absolution), tone and style (Death’s Sound of Perseverance, anything by Earth) and concept (Leviathan, Seventh Son of a Seventh Son), not to mention countless other configurations (try Flora by Chord for a rather obscure one). Even the track ordering is, for many bands, considered a fine art – Radiohead nearly split up over the ordering of OK Computer!

Some of the best albums released recently have been exactly that: albums, not just collections of good tunes. People downloading single tracks from Mastodon’s concept masterpiece Crack in the Skye surely miss the point and musch it’s beauty and power. Opeth’s Watershed and Baroness’s Red Album may not be ‘concept albums’, but the tracks belong together – they gel.

And it’s not all about the music. CD packaging is getting better and better and vinyl is still going strong. Putting together an album isn’t about recording a bunch of tracks, batching them up and putting them out, it’s an art form in itself, and one that many bands and fans alike still care deeply about.

So who thinks the album is dead? The bean counters of the record industry, that’s who.

The idea of repackaging the music download is not a bad one. The download market is one that never really lent itself to the album, and if people want to download an album, I can’t see any problem with making it a richer more rewarding experience for them. Packaging video, cover art, lyrics and (oh dear god no!) ringtones with the music is a way to help extend the album artform, and replace some of the value of the music that is lost in translation to download.

However, this whiffs of a cynical ploy by the music industry to sell more downloads to recoup revenues since those dastardly, party smashing plebeians, the public decided that they wanted freedom to download music however they damn well want. Given this motive it has the potential to pervert and cheapen the album art form out of recognition.

This is perhaps a moot point, as do people really want or need this? CD sales may be declining, but this is merely a symptom of the passive music fans who never really wanted whole albums anyway, but were forced to buy them, moving to another format. CD’s and vinyl are still the format of choice for real music fans. Given that music is now easily exchanged, bands are forced to put out much higher quality packaging and extras which, over time will become more valuable, collectable and will be truly cherished by fans in the way that these formats used to be.

So is the album format dead? Hell no, It’s stronger than ever!

(If you need any evidence that the CD Album format is alive and well check this out)

Since the hot topic of the moment is unsigned bands giving their music away free, I thought I’d mention one of my favourite bands at the moment, Cloudkicker, who are doing exactly that.

Cloudkicker from Columbus, Ohio are a instrumental post/prog-metal act that thus far, to my knowledge, have given their entire back catalogue away free as downloads (all available here for your enjoyment).

This is significant to me. When I first heard their tracks on Myspace, I thought it was decent enough, but nothing to get excited about, and buggered off to hunt down some more fresh tunes. Later, I came by the link to their download page, and being the habitual horder that I am, I downloaded their back catalogue as it was enjoyable enough and would pass some time. These tracks spent a few weeks turning up randomly on shuffle, and slowly started to infect me. Soon I found myself consciously choosing to listen to Cloudkicker.

Cloudkicker use percussive, pulsing guitars and lightly industrial flavours of bands like Meshuggah and Strapping Young Lad and blend with subtle swathes of ambient melody. Cloudkicker grows. This is precisely why giving their music away free is a good idea.

Folks are unlikely to keep going back to Myspace to listen to tracks, and much metal music, especially stuff like this, needs more than a cursory listen to really grok. Cloudkicker are unsigned. It seems unlikely that they would have gained the notoriety that they have purely on Myspace or by charging for CD’s or MP3’s. To my knowledge they don’t promote themselves (certainly not this side of the Atlantic) and the magazines give them no love. So they found their way to me by reputation and onto my playlist through regular listens. I have already told several people about them, and now I’m telling you.

Download these tracks. The worst that can happen is that you don’t like them, at which point just delete them.

iPhone - making people seem smaller the world over (in this case, Alice in Chains)

I wasn’t sure whether I’d bother going to Sonisphere, it all looked too commercial to me, like V festival. It was also ridiculously expensive. However, since I couldn’t get to Download or Bloodstock I decided to give it a whirl. The line-up on the Sunday was also hard to resist.

The sun had mad an appearance for the first time in weeks and not even the police with sniffer dogs arresting skunk-laden youths and the ridiculously long wait for the festival bus could dampen genial my mood.

Walking past the campsite, was an eerie experience. It was like a ghost town. You usually expect to hoards of youths wallowing in beer cans and piss sodden dirt attempting to dampen their hangover with stale beer. Not here. It even looked fairly tidy!

I turned just in time to catch Lamb of God (7/10). LoG are heavy hitters in the modern metal arena. With over a decade of experience behind them, and some highly acclaimed albums, they should be pretty good at their art by now. The ferocity of their music translates well to the festival environment, and their performance is tight. Randy Blythe has real presence, but his incessant intra-song posturing wears thin after a while. Yes we know you are real metal and your music stimulates circle pits. Yes, the idiots at the front will continue to beat each-other up for your gratification. Shut up and get on with the music!

No sooner had LoG finished than Mastodon (9/10) lumbered onto the other stage. Now, I recently threw my toys in this post about Mastodon’s performance at Islington Academy. I was expecting an abridged version of Crack in the Skye, so I wasn’t particularly looking forward to their set or surprised when they kicked off with album opener Oblivion. I’d also resolved not to be such a cancerous old git this time, so I stuck around. What we were actually treated to was a spirited set that, although was largely derived from Crack in the Skye, also contained some classics from previous albums (although Blood Mountain was entirely absent). Flying through Megalodon and Blood and Thunder, we were then treated to a note perfect performance of this year’s best metal track The Czar: Usurper/Escape/Martyr/Spiral – the whole bloody thing. Crack in the Skye’s title track was an absolute pleasure, followed by the brutal Iron Tusk and March of the Fire Ants from Remission.

Mastodon are on flying form. I saw them a few years ago at Wembley arena supporting Tool and they really seemed like they felt out of place in such a large venue. The band I witnessed on Sunday seemed like they owned the place. Not only are Mastodon recording some of the most original and high quality music in any genre, but they are one of the coolest bands around – these guys a really starting to look like rock stars.

That left me with a smile on my face and wondering if anyone could top such a gargantuan performance.

Metal fans amuse themselves by making themselves dizzy while Machine Head play

The crowd now meandered back to the main stage – the subject of everyone’s conversation: who are the mystery “Special Guests”. The subject of much media speculation since Machine Head acrimoniously pulled out of the festival when (infinitely more successful) Limp Bizkit usurped them out of their original slot in the line-up. Randy Blithe had previously let the cat out of the bag but obviously no-one was listening as they all seemed surprised when Machine Head (5/10) took the stage. Confusing? The word you’re looking for is demeaning. The Brits, never known for their likelihood to forsake a little ironic taunting, were chanting ‘Limp Bizkit’ while MH vocalist gave his speech about “doing it for the fans”. Also, the boasting about the 28 circle pits, or whatever, formed by obviously bored fans during their set, made him sound like a ego bruised 12 year old.

MH’s set was uninspired at best. They never sound good live. Their set was punctuated by long, uncomfortable silences and self-aggrandising rhetoric. Robb Flynn has since been demeaning himself further online by continuing this one-sided war of words, while (somewhat ironically) Limp Bizkit remain commendably reticent. This isn’t David and Goliath, it’s Goliath and some irritating little fly that needs swatting.

Feeder were up next so I wondered off and bought an Alice in Chains t-shirt and got increasingly drunk while I waited for them to finish. The only tracks I saw them play were an ill-advised cover of Nirvana’s Breed, and a rendition of their only good song Just a Day, which was very enjoyable in the sun with a pint of cider.

Next up were the mighty Alice in Chains (9/10). Here’s an occasion that was making many folk nervous. The legendary Layne Staley replaced by some unknown bloke with an afro? You better be sure about this Mr. Cantrell!

Going straight for the nuts with Angry Chair merging into Man in the Box the crowd’s tension dissipates. AIC sound massive – heavy and assured. New guy William Duval gives his own spin to these classics. He’s no Staley, but then who is? He sings the tunes faithful to the originals but doesn’t try and ape his distinctive predecessor. He’s got a strong voice and is very much his own man. He still lacks a little of the stage presence needed to really command a festival stage, but he’s strutting his stuff with the best of them.

4th track in and Duval broaches the subject of the new album before launching into Looking in View. Several folks around me (who clearly hadn’t heard this new track) were audibly nervous about hearing new AIC tracks, but were blown away by the tracks slow, heavy doom genius. AIC are really back!

The band saunter effortlessly through Dirt‘s Them Bones and Dam That River and the crowd are getting really animated. We’re then treated to a second new track, the much jauntier Check My Brain. Like a perkier Again, this track has a really memorable chorus.

The closing salvo of crowd pleaser Would? and the haunting Rooster has the crowd singing at the top of their voices as the sun sets. Perfect.

So, fired up and raring for more top grade metal, the crowd once again makes the merry trek up to the main stage for Nine Inch Nails (3/10). This supposedly NIN’s last ever tour. They’ve had a long and distinguished career, and countless, memorable tracks that the majority of the crowd would surely know. So did they rattle of a greatest hits set for this rapturous audience? No, like the petulant and self indulgent tosser he is, Trent Reznor ‘treated’ us all to a set comprised of mostly ambient and barely audible arty numbers. I can’t even be bothered to track down what was actually played. Every time a track finished (it was kind of difficult to tell one track from the next) you could hear an audible intake of breath from the crowd hoping that the next sound would be the first few notes from Closer.

They closed the set with a note for note version of their (now) best known track Hurt. This seems entirely out of place as the crowd mumble along dispiritedly with the Jonny Cash version in their heads.

I’m a big fan of NIN, but this display was nothing short of offensive. Not appropriate or impressive, just shit.

I’d like to tell you all about Avenged Sevenfold, but they’re shit, so I didn’t watch them. I got through about 3 songs of Metallica’s set before James Hetfield, clearly taking notes from Robb Flynn’s earlier waffle, decided to indulge in some sycophantic crowd wooing. I saw then live, and much closer, a few months back, and I had a long journey home ahead of me. There was no way they would top AIC and Mastodon, so I left Hetfield wittering on and went home.

It’s not coincidence that the vast majority of the bands and musicians we see most frequently are also pretty well off financially. This privileged clique has billion pound corporations behind them, huge record deals, they get money for just turning up places. They are conspicuous because they have a load of money to promote themselves (and experienced professionals to help them do it) and from this they make more money. They also represent a tiny fraction of all recording artists, the vast majority of whom make little or no money from their art.

Perhaps it’s the lure of big bucks that leads unsigned bands to assume that they should make money from their efforts from day one. It’s just as likely that they’ve shelled a bunch of money for demo recordings and they need to cover costs. This is fair enough, but it’s also a very short sighted view. Let me explain.

Ever since serial smug twat Trent Reznor had his say on the matter of unsigned bands giving their stuff away for free I’ve been pondering the problem of new bands being able to support their art. This week journalist and industry observer Cosmo Lee had his say on his blog Invisible Oranges. Both these guys make very compelling points, but still I see dissent among unsigned bands who see it as only fair that they can recoup their investment.

Now, I’m not in a band, I don’t even work in the music industry. I do however work in the business arena, and from that perspective this attitude seems absurd. I’ll start out by saying that bands are NOT businessmen (for the most part) and should not be expected to be. Their job is to make music. To be able to continue doing this, and not end up in crippling debt, they need to have some income to support this. Having a job on the side is not usually enough – a lot of these kids want to make a career out of making music. This is a noble cause, and they should be commended for it, but it’s not easy to do so.

So, despite the fact that the primary motivator is, and should be, music, some consideration should, in most cases, be given to making money.

Now, for the sake of comparison let’s look at small businesses. I’ll use an (imaginary) example – Jenny is a hobby jewellery maker (really evil looking gothic stuff with pentagrams and shit). She’s been making stuff in her spare time and selling it on at cost to her mates, mainly for the love of it. One day she realises that she’s selling so much that she could make a career out of this. So she decides to quit her job and start her jewellery making business. Now, with her kit in the garage, she’ll never be able to pump out enough merchandise to support her doing this full time. So she’ll need to invest in some new kit and probably rent some a bigger space to house it. Also, although she’s selling a good amount of stuff now, she’ll need to sell a lot more to make the venture even break even. So she’ll need to promote herself – to advertise in trade and music magazines costs more money. So she borrows some cash from her parents and the rest from the bank. The understanding is that she’ll pay back the bank in monthly instalments immediately, and will start paying her parents back when she starts making a profit – her projections say in 3 years time (taking into account overheads, tax etc.), although depending on sales this could be more or less. In the meantime, she will take a salary of a bit above minimum wage to cover her living expenses.

This is a very common scenario. MUCH more common than instances of bands starting out. Jenny does not expect to recoup her initial investment as soon as she makes it, it will take time.

Now, back to the bands. Music is NOT a commodity any more for the most part – it’s freely available and easily exchanged. Jewellery is tangible and, assuming that the materials are worth something and workmanship is good, is a commodity. Jenny will more than likely receive money for her wares, but her business will not make money (ie. Profit), for a long time. The business will remain in negative equity and she personally will be living on the breadline.

Unsigned bands may expect (and be able) to sell CD’s or even MP3’s, but is this a sensible idea? Without a significant fan base, and their music being easy to exchange, it’s unlikely that they’ll recoup any investment at all. All that they are doing is making it harder for folks to hear their music.

Jenny had to shell out cash to promote herself. For bands, this is traditionally a role that record labels perform. For record labels this is a difficult task, for unsigned bands it’s nigh on impossible. One way of promoting yourself is to make your music freely available and encourage folks to share it. Get people to record your shows, and put them on Youtube. Take any opportunity you can to get your music heard, it is, after all, your wares, not the CD on which it’s recorded.

Once you’ve got a few people at your shows you can start really capitalising on this by selling merchandise, and maybe you can afford to make a really nice digipack version of your demo – something that people will really want to own (they probably already own the music contained therein).

Will you get return on your investment at this point? Hell no! You won’t even get it if/when a record label signs you. You may not even see it after scoring your first Gold record. This stuff takes time, effort, talent (sometimes) and a lot of luck (always).

If you don’t like to think of this outlay as an initial investment, call it a loss leader, a well understood retail tactic of offloading stuff at a loss, under the understanding that this will get poeple hooked in and coming back for more.

I’m not saying that bands should run themselves like a business, but business is in the business of making money, and you would be wise to pay heed of this. Unless you’re the next Artic Monkeys, it’s unlikely that you’ll see that cash rolling in from just being a band, so if you want to survive, be smart and forward thinking.

Join the debate over at UKMU.