Rounding out the year...

So I guess this is it, the final day of what has been a really good year.

Since November my blog posts have been sporadic and few and far between, each time me promising that I'm going to get back to sitting down and writing more regularly and each time me failing to deliver on it.

So let me explain publicly for the first time why I've been so quiet. There's 2 reasons really, the first being that my mind has simply been overloaded with amazing music this year that it could not cope with more being added in so hence there was not much to review and secondly and rather more importantly I've been working on a little side project. I can't yet say too much but what I will say is that next year I will be making my first foray into the music industry. The project has a tentative launch date in March 2010 and by this time next year it could be either a success or a dramatic failure but either way it will be a life enriching experience and one I'm pretty excited although cautiously optimistic about.

But before I close the year off I want to add some thank you's to some people whose music has dramatically enhanced my collection this year. So here goes:-

Kevin Montgomery
Ragz Nordset
Francesco Cinelli (Goodtimes Goodtimes)
Thomas J Speight
Paul Cook (...and the Chronicles)
Foy Vance

And an ultra special thanks to three musical acts who I truly believe are set for greatness next year (and who have provided me with the most amazing music, warmth and friendship)...

Greg Holden
Omer Leshem
Strange Folks / Roy Rieck and the Medley Band - Idan Rabinovici, Roy Rieck, Roy "Hamudi" Rabinovici, Emmanuel Slonim, Nadav Luzia, Daniel Shoham and Joseph E-Shine

I'd also like to thank each and every one of you who have stopped by and read my musings on music, those of you who have viewed my many videos on youtube, dropped me an email, followed me on twitter, etc.

Lastly to play us out (I've always wanted to say that)...here's some recommendations of people I'm monitoring closely with an eye to early 2010 purchases...

Daniel Kamas
City and Colour
Jon T
Matt Saxton
Luka Bloom
Massy Ferguson

Happy New Year, here's hoping 2010 is an amazing year for us all xxx

Is it safe to come out from behind the sofa yet?

That's the question kids up and down the country, if not across the world used to ask, and probably still do when sci-fi institution Doctor Who graced/graces the TV screens. But in my case, the TV nasty in question is the UKs very own "musical talent contest" the X Factor which I believe has finally finished tonight.

So I guess in that short statement you know where I stand on Simon Cowell's circus. Is it really music, well I guess 12+ million people in the UK would say it is, and then many millions more would tell you it isn't, I guess it depends on your perspective. For me it's not music, it's not about anything but gross profiteering and the production of more facsimile tribute act popstars to flood an already crowded musical world. What it creates is another layer of "noise" (not in the musical sense) that just further surpresses talent that is trying to get itself heard through the conventional methods of hard work and genuine talent.

Let's be realistic, as a contest it takes people with no better than half-decent singing voices and average talent and transforms them in a matter of months from being a total nothing to a chart sensation and that's good for them, I think we'd all love to go from a zero to hero in a short space of time for doing something where we receive acclaim from the masses whilst earning a stack of money but what is the end musical product?

I guess it depends what your musical taste is, but for me, good/great musicians need to be able to answer 2 of 3 questions with an affirmative answer to classify as having proper talent. Those questions are...can you sing well and with passion, can you play an instrument, are you able to write your own lyrics and music? See there's plenty of people out there who can answer yes to all three of those questions, let alone two of them but most on talent shows will struggle to answer yes to one of them and here's the thing about TV talent shows. Even if you as artist can answer yes to those questions, the likelihood is that your musical choices have already been decided for you and they're purely commercially driven decisions, it's profits over music all the way.

I guess that's probably the reason why you never seen singer/songwriters or proper bands on shows like the X Factor, it's a mix between genuine talent not necessarily being mainstream enough, the artists refusing to sell out their talent for money and from the likes of Mr Cowell's perspective the commercial risk of someone being allowed to release their own music without littering it with covers and fluffy meaningless songs.

The problem I guess I have with music TV talent shows though is the real potential damage that they're likely to have on the music industry in the longer term. First of all, kids now are growing up thinking that unless they get on TV they don't have talent, second that they'll see this as an accepted musical medium and if they want to create music think it more important to fit the mould rather than explore their own musical paths and finally they're growing up with the vision that the music industry is easy to crack and is simply a vehicle to making huge amounts of money....the bottom line is, it's not.

X Factor has a place...just not in my house or on my iPod...that's all I'm saying.

Nite all xxx

CDs versus Digital Downloads...

Where on earth do the days go? I keep promising to get back to blogging regularly then I blink and 10 days go by and I realise I haven't blogged.

Tonight rather than reviewing music I wanted to be a bit discussive and ponder a few thoughts, perhaps even get your synapses going. One of the debates I'm constantly having is CDs or Digital Downloads. Now before I start, I think I'll clarify where I stand on it...I'm a CD freak, I'll always choose a CD over a DD. I'm a bit of a traditionalist in the sense that I like something physical to hold when I'm playing music. I like the physical nature of being able to flick through the booklet reading the lyrics as opposed to searching for them online.

But that's not to say I don't adore my iPod, I really do, in fact I actually classify the iPod as the greatest thing I have ever purchased...by some considerable distance.

So here's the thing, I'm not anti-digital download. In fact I'm really pro legal downloads, I have hundreds of them. Had it not been for the internet revolution and the technological advancement of the music industry, local and regional talent would have remained just that.

Nowadays, an artist has the ability to build a global fanbase (of any size) through the internet alone. How many artists have we all discovered through myspace, imeem, youtube, facebook, itunes, spotify, and dare I say it in the formative years of the internet, the likes of napster, limewire and torrent sites (not that I'm condoning music piracy)?

But the internet has undoubtedly had the most dramatic effect on the proliferation of music distribution in a way that I doubt anything has since the invention of the transistor radio in the 1950s. Before the transistor radio, only the well-off were able to afford big bulky valve radios. In fact so expensive were they that people bought kits and built their own.

But like all new technology, when the transistor radio finally made it to market, the cost was astronomical but within a few years as the components became mass produced and the cost of the raw materials dropped, the price began to drop and the market exploded and before long everyone had access to this musical vehicle...sounds familiar?

The transistor radio brought music from across a country into living rooms and bedrooms of houses but also gave music its first real portability. I guess it would be fair to say that the transistor radio was one of, if not the main vehicle behind the explosion of music that came in the late 50's and then into the 60's and beyond. It allowed youngsters to listen to the music they liked instead of what their parents listened to....and so a new generation of free-thinking expressive music lovers were born.


The same scenario to lesser extents applies to the cassette tape, the CD and the ill-fated minidisc. But all these things helped shape the music we have today and kept pushing the boundaries of music distribution and portability. And so you'd think that digital music, digital downloads could only be a further advancement and undoubtedly it has been and a very positive one certainly in terms of convenience but there are some perhaps unexplored and real downsides to it.

Let's suppose for a moment that we live in a Utopian musical society where everyone buys music and there's no such thing as piracy...every other rule applies however and society is otherwise unchanged. We still live in a world of convenience where we have to have everything now be it clothes, electronics, food or music, we consume it and then move on to the next item quickly forgetting our last purchase.

I'm as guilty as the next of finding new and exciting music, playing it to death until I find something else I really like and then moving on sometimes not revisiting that music I loved for some considerable time; and therein lies the first problem! Digital music is easily losable, you can store it away or maybe even more stupidly delete it and forget it ever existed, with an LP, cassette, CD you just couldn't do that, unless you put it up in the loft/attic/basement and even then you had to make that conscious decision to move it to a place of reasonable inaccessibility. So the digital age is making music too disposable and that actually risks today's generation not being able to pass anything musically on to the future in the way that the 60's passed on The Beatles, Elvis, Roy Orbison, The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan...in fact now I come to think of it, that list is endless. We simply won't hand down our ipods to future generations in the way physical music has been so today's amazing music will be lost forever in 30 years time...how sad is that?

What about artwork? Most will tell you they don't care about the jewel cases or the booklets. Some will even give you the spuriously weak answer of trying to be environmentally conscious. The truth is that a digital download is cheaper and immediately available and that governs the purchasing decision. But digital music pretty much alleviates the necessity for a creative to sit there, concept and design artwork. Let's not forget that what many now regard as a non-essential gave rise to true works of modern popular art such as The Beatles iconic Abbey Road cover. With digital music, record labels, music producers and artists can simply produce a 500 x 500 pixel image and that will suffice for an album. So where will these future classic and iconic works of art come from, it won't be music, that's for sure.


Finally there's one thing to consider about digital music. As I stated much earlier it has allowed musicians to build a truly global fanbase and it has allowed unsigned talented musicians to put music out into the world on mass distribution without the cost of producing thousands of CDs to send round the world (which is a frightfully expensive thing to do if you have no assurance of actually selling them), but there's a serious possibility that pretty soon record labels will go down the route of solely producing digital music in a bid to ramp up their falling profits (courtesy of music piracy) at the expense of the musician.

But ask enough musicians and they'll tell you that they prefer CDs, after all, they sit down to write songs, play music, go into a studio to record, edit and mix and then there's no actual final physical product, so some question rightly or wrongly what they're actually producing. I guess it must be quite disheartening to do all of that work to see nothing at the end of it apart from a link on various web sites. On top of that, the lack of physicality means that artists have nothing tangible to sell or even sign at gigs. How many people will actually go home after a gig and still have that impulsive attitude to go and buy music, very few I'd guess so in a way the net result of digital music is that it may actually damage the incremental income an artist gets from a gig which could be the difference between success or failure for even the most talented of musician.

So yes, digital music is brilliant, it's opened up music from across the globe to everyone and I have made countless discoveries because of it, but if the world continues to moves too far towards it, we risk losing so much more than just a piece of slightly bendy plastic, and I think that's really quite sad.

I'll leave you with one final thought, recently an album in Ireland got to number 1 in the album charts having only sold 400 CDs in its first week, but something like 15,000 digital downloads.

Maybe I'm old fashioned or a romantic but now hopefully you see why I'm so passionate about CDs and I hope that all record labels make a solemn commitment to their artists to keep putting music on CDs, the world needs it, our music legacy demands it, don't you think so?

Goodnight all xxx