Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet - Ride & Radiohead

Ben Wardle's A&Rmchair leaps from Rob Fitzpatrick to Susan Boyle, via 1990s Oxford:

And I have to say I'm as guilty as anyone for subscribing to the looks fascism that has always existed in the music business. Or entire entertainment business for that matter. Half of the reason I was excited about Ride was that Mark Gardner was just so good looking. And the reason I, like a lot of people, passed on On A Friday wasn't that the demo didn't have enough strong songs on it - it was that the singer had a paralysed eye and we just couldn't imagine audiences getting past that.

Plan B for Allen: Scouting

If Lily Allen's second album flops, she's got an idea of what to do next: turning to A&R:

"I'm really scared about what people are going to say. Some people will like it and some won't.

"If people hate it, then I'll just try something else. I'd really like to do A&R at a record company. I love going to gigs."

Great idea. If you're able to so badly misjudge the public taste as to turn your career into a nosedive, why not share that anti-midas touch with record labels as a career?

Guy Hands slaps A&R

Having had some time to peer at the inner doings of EMI, Guy Hands has seen the role of A&R up close:

"The power and the decision has sat with the A&R man, who is someone who gets up late in the day, listens to lots of music, goes to clubs, spends his time with artists and has a knack of knowing what would sell."

So, people who live an unconventional lifestyle but, crucially, live and breathe music and understand what the people want to hear. Sounds good. Except, erm, Hands doesn't think that they're the best people to choose what records to release:

"What we are doing is taking the power away from the A&R guys and putting it with the suits - the guys who have to work out how to sell music."

So - instead of the people who understand music and know what people want, Hands is passing the power to people who don't understand music but get their sales through brute force of advertising. It does make some sort of sense - creating products which people actually need and want and value is time consuming and expensive; creating any old shit and flogging it through adverts is cheap and, of course, lucrative. It's not like Hands cares, is it? He's not going to have problems sleeping with this deal.

Oddly, though, having suggested that marketing is where the power should be seated, Hands, erm, then suggests that marketing people don't know what they're doing, either:

"You might as well have put a £50 note on the CD - it probably would have done better [than some EMI imprints' marketing]."

That sounds like the place to pour your resources into, then.

EMI might be more trouble than we'd imagined.

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet

John Niven writes in the Times, recalling his time as an A&R man as the party was coming to an end:

I quickly learnt a key fundamental for survival in meetings - say everything with absolute certainty and as though your life depended upon it. I saw a very senior industry figure (someone who, in all likelihood, has signed and developed music which you own) throw the first White Stripes record out of a fourth floor window with the words: “No one will ever - ever - be having this f***ing nonsense!”

I went one further. As the last chords of a mildy hot demo hung in the air I punctured the silence in the conference room with: “Is anyone really going to be having another bunch of sub-Radiohead drivel?” Thus did I terminate our company's interest in the emerging Coldplay.

Coco crispy

We're aware that Coco isn't actively trying to capitalise on being Sting's daughter as she embarks on the family business - besides having Trudi Styler come to the gigs and including lines about not being Sting. But like the employment of Derek Conway's sons, there's a nagging sense that somehow the current interest from A&R people is down to where she's from, rather than for what she can do.

EMI wants you to do their A&R for them

In a move not-entirely-unlike Sony's Vox initiative from six months ago, EMI are inviting bands to use a service which will sort-of-somehow-function as an A&R operation:

The Scoutr feature offers a service for musicians to create profiles, upload their new tracks and have them rated by other users using a similar system to as music recommendation site Last.fm.

This is either BTgetoutthere all over again, a brave attempt to democratise decision making, a weak company that's lost faith in its own abilities to predict what people will like, or all of the above.

The twin weaknesses here are that there's little demand for yet another unsigned artist site, where - by the very nature of bands - most music will be made by acts who don't have a record contract for a very good reason; and, more dispiritingly, if you leave decisions about where to put your budget to a popular vote, you end up with a world of Will Youngs and Girls Alouds, rather than more specialist tastes that could serve a smaller audience, but over a longer period. Would, say, The Cure, or even U2, have got a deal if they were required to please a mass, undistinguished audience?

Sure, Scoutr could have be a useful tool, but it's not clear what it can discover that getting an A&R guy to spend some time surfing MySpace or Bebo couldn't work out.

Still, EMI have already announced some bright, new talent: John Birt's just joined the board.