My PC hates Myspace

You can not have fail to notice that Myspace is in terminal decline. Barely an update in a year, it has become largely redundant as a social platform as the ubiquitous Facebook outstrips them on every level. And everyone hates it! It’s cluttered with ugly, heavy designs and the music player is flakier than an dandruff ridden scalp. But as a promotional platform for musicians it’s still #1 right? Well not so according to a recent article on paidContent.org which suggests that Myspace is losing the music promotion battle to Google owned online video giant YouTube.

A high-level examination of the top-ten most-played songs makes the shift abundantly clear. During the same period, the ten most-played music videos on YouTube racked 57.3 million views, while the top ten on MySpace Music generated 7.5 million.

OK, so YouTube is a better medium for the big players to reach their audience (if you were looking to hear the latest Metallica track, would you really start with Myspace?), but what about unsigned/independent/underground bands and musicians, is Myspace still a safe bet for them?

The competition in the market is rife, with various new websites that are beating Myspace at their own game and in a more forward thinking, agile and, most importantly, band/consumer friendly way. Soundcloud, Bandcamp and Nimbit all have their own take on social music promotion and streaming. Variously offering full digital download ecommerce, more advanced and portable/embedded streaming, extensive social functions and fresh, flexible layouts. However, for the moment at least, Myspace has something that the rest of the pack (YouTube excepting) don’t have – ubiquity.

Being the pre-eminent destination to ‘check out’ new bands is not something to be sniffed at. Heard of this great band Coffinworm and want to find out what they sound like? Do you go looking for their website? No, you simply type in to Google ‘Coffinworm myspace’ and go check them out there. Every band has one – Myspace is like the Yellow Pages of bands. Even if you weren’t specifically looking for Coffinworm’s Myspace, or any other band, their Myspace is usually the first Google listing you see. The Myspace domain carries a lot of weight, and even though the profile pages are pretty dodgy from an SEO perspective, they tend to rank quickly and highly, usually above the band’s own website. It will take literally years for the competitors to build up that level of Google love.

So bands, as much as you may despise Myspace, and are charmed by Bandcamp’s swanky (and in reality far superior) features, it’s not time to bail on Myspace just yet. However, you can’t spread your promotional effort across Myspace and all the other new players, and neither should you. From a search perspective, centring all your web activity around a single base is absolutely essential lest you should spread your SEO love too thinly. My advice is to attempt a smooth and steady transition to another service, while still keeping your Myspace pretty fresh. Gradually move your SEO focus over to the new profile and centre your promotional activity there only when that starts to rank in the search engine results at a similar level to your Myspace. You’re probably going to have to do this at some point, so why not start now.

Bands just starting out should look at what other bands in their genre are doing. If there is a particularly strong presence on Myspace, then it may be safer to stick with that, but if there’s a real buzz elsewhere then centre your activity there but fire up a Myspace and shove a few tracks on there, as folks will still go looking there and the web presence is generally helpful.

And as for YouTube? Unless you have a promo video, then you’re looking at having to post your tracks with an album cover or some band pics, which is fine, but really you’re shoehorning. Currently, although convenient, it’s not really tailored for the job. YouTube is a really helpful promotional platform, but bands should centre their activity around a site with more focus on doing just that as you’ll soon find YouTube very limiting.

Myspace no longer suits either the bands or the fans, who are voting with their feet, but its death will be slow and painful. It may be that one or more of these rival websites has a trick up its sleeve, or perhaps some well employed venture capital, that will propel it into the general consciousness, until then hedge your bets folks.

What I spent my hard earned cash on recently.

The Ocean – Heliocentric

On releasing Precambrian, The Ocean had a whiff of the future about them. Delivering punishing post-metal reminiscent of Cult of Luna but stretching into more old school prog territories, referencing the likes of Pink Floyd. With Heliocentric they take a fairly radical turn, apparently into more post-hardcore territory. The fact that, with new vocalist Loic Rossetti, Heliocentric demonstrates a preference for clean vocals, although significant, isn’t really a concern here. It’s the fact that they’ve had to employ some fairly hackneyed melodic techniques to accommodate them. Now sounding like a less mature Oceansize, the band may view this as a personal progression, but it the grand scheme of things, this ends up sounding like the faux-boundary pushing of the likes of Between the Buried and Me. There are some rousing moments here, and hints at former glories, but nothing that really grabs the listener screaming “we have just rewired you brain!”, which is what I was hoping for. This is the sound of a band finding its feet with a new sound, and I commend them for it, but The Ocean have been around for quite a while now, and they should be sounding like a band well and truly in their stride. Heliocentric is part of a pendant of complementary albums, the second to be released late 2010 – we can only hope that they saved all their real creativity for the second half.

Cathedral – The Guessing Game

Unlike The Ocean, Cathedral are a band branching out into new, progish areas and sounding like they’ve been doing it all their lives. Cathedral’s sound may not be new any more, but they’ve always managed to make music that sounds totally out there, and The Guessing Game is the most ‘out there’ record they’ve released in a very long time. This is not an album for those new to Cathedral unless you happen to be a veteran with lengthy, noodling old school prog. But this isn’t simply prog revisionism, nor is it merely Cathedral ‘doing prog’, this is a pretty bold artistic statement and one that will see them revered as metal revolutionaries for another decade to come. Dorian and team feel as fresh as ever, and in terms of maturity and damned right assuredness, they’re so far ahead of the pack they almost everyone else may as well just give up.

The Dillinger Escape Plan – Option Paralysis

Perhaps the title of The Dillinger Escape Plan’s 4th full length album is indicative of their state of mind when they recorded this album. Throughout their career Dillinger have broadened their palate to include whatever damn well suited them and be damned with the rest of you. Managing to shock and confound on every single release, the seemingly endless diversity of the musical form was once again before them like giant smorgasbord for them to indulge their sonic crapulence. Option Paralysis describes the state where you have so many options available to you that you are mentally unable to act on any of them. In The Plan’s case, they appear to have been paralysed, for the first time in their career, into standing still, which is sad, because although Option Paralysis is a good album by any band’s standards, it lacks the elements of surprise and obstinacy that has really defined Dillinger’s career to date. I’ll forgive them for this hiatus from creativity, but the next release better damn well be a marshmallow vindaloo of an album.

Barren Earth – The Curse of the Red River

With Opeth sounding like Opeth while managing to sound utterly different with every release, Barren Earth sound like Opeth trying to not sound like Opeth. A mix of doomy death and through-the-ages prog, Barren Earth’s sound is Technicolor and cavernous. Referencing 70’s prog in a more literal sense than Opeth, complete with synth solos and folkish bits, there’s a distinct air of Dream Theatre. Unfortunately, for almost every instance of proggy goodness, the unsubtly arranged and delivered death vocals spoil the party – Curse… sometimes has a whiff of Nu-Metal about it. It’s like the DM vocals are there purely to qualify this album a progressive death record, but this is akin to remixing a King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King with hip-hop interludes. There are moments of pure Death here, but they mostly sound like Opeth, with a bit of Morbid Angel thrown in. It grates to the extent that I simply don’t enjoy listening to this, an album that otherwise I’d really love. I don’t rate albums but if I did, it Curse of the Red River would get 2/10 as a (prog)-death album, and 8/10 as pure prog.

Ludicra – The Tenant

Whether the kvlt like it or not, Black Metal is evolving. That doesn’t mean hardcore crossovers and progressive dabbling, but developing its monolithic core around creative minds and thus spewing a more paisley misanthropic ooze. So here we have San Francisco’s Ludicra and an oestrogen inflected black masterpiece called The Tenant. Ludicra mix tempos and melodies not usually associated with BM, but somehow obviously belonging to BM as if they merely discovered them in some corpse infested basement. The Tenant is at times mournful, others unsettlingly aggressive, managing to inject melody and riff hungry groove, evoking anything from Burzum to Megadeth to labelmates Worm Ourourboros. The female element is apparent, straying from the lowbrow bludgeoning of much of the genre, softening edges where they need softening, but tearing ragged maws to redress the balance – this is not ‘softer’ just more balanced. Regardless of genre, The Tenant is an accomplished record as you’ll find this year, and one that simply radiates class and creativity. Black Metal it is, through and through, but of a new sort, not progressive, just a progression.

You gotta do it all yourself these days

It’s all about the music, isn’t it? No-one needs to make money to make music, but it certainly helps. Modern music begs to be created by and channeled through increasingly advanced technology, to be heard on multifarious shores. Music is global, dispersed and, increasingly, non-commoditised. Some money is necessary to facilitate this, but there’s less and less of the filthy stuff around. In 2009 global music related revenues slumped 7%, continuing a decline that began in the early naughties when the digital revolution took hold.

But it’s not as simple a picture of piracy induced decline as the record industry would like us to believe. What’s most important to understand is that digital theft is only partly to blame for these financial woes. Due to the ease on distribution of the new digital formats, and the ability to buy single tracks off of albums without buying the whole thing, sales have migrated away from lucrative CD sales (which supports a massive production and distribution infrastructure) to considerably less lucrative digital forms starving both the recording and distribution industries of cash. The way people consume music has changed forever, but the music industry was slow to catch on.

There has also taken place a devaluing of the music. Because of the ease of distribution of digital media, and no tangible way of stemming the free exchange of digital music files, a key economic law has been violated: the law of scarcity. Put simply, a ‘commodity’ that is desirable but abundant or freely available has a low (or non-existent) intrinsic value. Musicians and the industry alike would probably balk at this, but it’s an immutable law of economics that everyone’s going to have to get used to.

That said, the digital market is thriving in almost every territory, and the music based revenues in Australia, Brazil, South Korea, Sweden and the UK grew last year because of this. But it still remains harder than ever to make money out of music, and as a result record labels (key for providing funding for bands to produce and market their wares) are less able to take on new acts. This is leading to an anti-diversification of the music that’s being marketed to the masses and a preference for pushing legacy acts. This trend is likely partly responsible for the fact that digital sales, volumes of streamed tracks and even those of pirated tracks are all trending towards the popular end of the market. The ease and low cost of production and distribution of music mean that there are more acts than ever competing for listener attention. These three facts, among many others, mean that it’s tougher than ever for a marginal/unsigned/independent artist to get heard, let alone make money.

As a result bands are having to become marketing/promotion machines on top of all the other diversifying tasks they are having to take on in the absence of labels. Some see this as bad thing, others see it as bands being forced into taking control of their own destiny – this may come with much more work, and countless pitfalls and gotchas, but for those successful the immediate rewards are much higher. Unfortunately, only bands with a lot of nouse, real dedication and a lot of luck are likely to make this a reality, which leads us back to the labels – the market needs for them to start taking risks again, and quickly.

Instead, the big players have been trying to litigate and legislate their way out of their deepening hole. The former has yielded little success and cost a lot of money, the latter has had some success with legislation passed in both France and UK. The UK’s Digital Economy Act is controversial to say the least (it gives media companies the power to request that repeat offenders have their internet cut off) and was rushed through in a potentially unconstitutional fashion. This legislation is unlikely to work, not least because it won’t grow any teeth for at least 2 years, by which point Plan B will (God willing) have taken hold.

What’s Plan B? Well it’s already happening around you and the record industry is only mildly less worried about it than they were when this pesky digital revolution thingy started happening in the first place: streaming.

Industry backed Spotify currently dominates the European streaming market and is already becoming ubiquitous. The last software update saw them integrating with Facebook and including listener’s own MP3 library in playlists – a move which should give iTunes pause for concern. However, Spotify isn’t making anyone much money at the moment, least of all the artists, and there’s a palpable sense of “when will they shut it down” in the air. Until that is rival little cousin We7, whose revenue and royalty payout model yields better results, posted profits last quarter apparently proving that an advertising based streaming service can be profitable. The market is really hotting up, and with Apple recently squashing streaming service Lala, rumours are rife that they are preparing an iTunes based streaming service in an attempt to muscle in on the party.

These streaming services will need to become truly mobile before they are a viable alternative to MP3’s (Spotify already are for paid subscribers) and even with We7 turning a profit, it’s unlikely that they’ll be really embraced by the industry unless they can turn over a bit more cash, most likely via mandating paid subscription. One way or another, streaming would seem to represent the future of digital media, and once firmly established should render filesharing redundant.

This being the case, the situation we’re currently in, where making money out of selling music directly is nigh on impossible, will remain so for the foreseeable future and probably forever. That’s not to say that one can’t make money out of music. Live music is a big growth area at the moment, with many record labels looking to monetise their acts this way. However, this is driving ticket and bar prices up which could have the effect of squashing this market too.

An interesting side effect of digital streaming is that it’s actually widening the music listening audience. 60% of people never buy music, however, services like Spotify are engaging these people into actively consuming music and converting them into potential revenue targets – they may not want to buy music, but they may well pay to see it, or simply swallow some advertising for the privilege. Understanding, expanding and exploiting this ‘new’ audience will be key to the evolution of the music industry.

So where does all this leave the music industry? Well there’s a bunch of people that don’t make music who probably will have to find careers in different industries, but the people who do make the music are likely to carry on doing so, regardless of the economic welfare of the music industry. The economic battle will be fought by suits who will utter the word ‘licensing’ a lot while worrying about the logistics of an increasingly complex royalty system. The music is thriving, even if it’s not as good at generating dosh as it was before, and thanks largely to the advent of digital distribution, there’s a larger audience than ever before. The music exists without the industry, and that’s what matters.

Since my bout of rampant music stats geekery I’ve been getting a tad OCD over the last.fm listening habits of you metal heads. So much so that I wrote a PHP application that queries the API and pulls back lots of lovely data (I’ll unleash this on the public when I’ve had the chance to debug it and tidy it up a bit). I’ve been munging and caressing the data to see what wonders it yields, some of which I’m going to share with you over a few articles.

Previously I uncovered In Flames fans’ obsessive behaviour by observing the interaction between their playcount and listeners. This is interesting, but only tells us part of the story. Just because a band’s fans listen to lots of their tracks, doesn’t mean that they spend that much time listening to them. Napalm Death fans listening to their debut album Scum will consume 28 tracks in 33 minutes, whereas Earth fans would only squeeze 1 track off of Earth 2 in that time. So we need to look at another dimension: track length. To do this I calculate the average track length from the band’s 50 most listened to tracks then multiply that by the overall playcount. This is what we get:

(Just in case you were wondering, that amounts to Metallica fans having collectively spent 1.5 centuries listening to their beloved band)

This doesn’t really change the picture that much. Metallica are still way out front, and the big boys still dominate. So let’s look at a slightly different stat – Average Time per Listener. We get this by multiplying the Plays per Listener with the Average Song Length. A pretty fuzzy calculation I know, but indicative none the less. Here’s what we get:

So here we see that Opeth fans spend quite a lot more time lost in the meanderings of Mr. Akerfeldt than any other band. In Flames, perhaps unsurprisingly, make a reappearance, and bringing up the rear, the real underdog, the dark lords of Orthodox Black Metal – Deathspell Omega.

Interestingly this does even the score somewhat with the critics list, as we now have Neurosis and Tool in the top 15, however, Black Sabbath suffer even greater humilation in this list as they drop down to number 49, just behind Lostprophets…ouch!

So, what does this tell us about the listening habits of the metal head? Well, I think it demonstrates that we’re and obsessive bunch, and we like what we like, and lots of it. Also, stats like this go some way to filtering out the noise of the casual listener and indicate where the real heart of the metal community lies.