Its 6am in London. Pitch black outside, and snow still on the ground. Feeling a bit shivery….
And then I opened my emails to find this link sent to me by a friend. Instant sunshine and yet somehow seasonal. Playing For Change is a great charity that makes a real difference and makes some wondeful music. Learn more about Playing For Change here, you might like to make a seasonal donation to them?
I used to run music recording studios including Abbey Road in London and Capitol Studios in Los Angeles. Years ago, artists had to go to places like that if they wanted to make a record because there simply wasn’t any alternative. Buying your own new recording desk cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. Hiring a professional studio wasn’t that cheap either (2k per day at the top of the market) and so artists needed to be signed to a record company who would advance them the money to go and make their recording. Record companies also offered distribution (it was a hell of bind getting bits of plastic into shops around the world) and had money left over to make some marketing noise (inevitably: ads in NME,Q, bill posters, radio ads, tv ads and maybe a comical stunt to get in the daily papers).
This is no longer the case. Point of entry to access the means of production has dropped so that artists no longer need to go to a professional studio. Garageband comes free with each mac. It’s perfectly decent recording software and you can get Pro Tools (which is tool of choice in the remaining professional studios) for just a few hundred pounds. Record companies pay considerably smaller recording advances these days and artists spend the money on building their own cheap and cheerful (and perfectly good) home studio. Most of the great recording studios have closed down. I struggle to think of a single one of note in New York, these days. The value of the real estate they were based in far outweighed the dwindling revenues generated by studio business and owners cashed in with a property play during the property boom. Abbey Road and Capitol Studios do orchestral work for films and tv and have diversified to survive. Meanwhile the low price of recording equipment means that more and more people are making records. Its not limited to professional musicicans anymore and a huge hobbyist market has sprung up. Pretty much anybody can record a song if they want to. And pretty much anybody who wants to make a record would seem to be doing so as the number of records being released each year growing astronomically. You can also get your record up onto itunes etc yourself by using Tunecore or AWAL. Two of the three key functions of the old record company (funding the recording and providing distribution) have been knocked on the head by the new technologies.
And now its happening to film. Tiny Furniture is creating a stir in the US. It was shot on a Canon 7D digital SLR which currently costs just over a thousand pounds on Amazon. I’ve not seen the film but from the trailer below it looks interesting if not one that I’d rush out to the cinema to see. What is exciting is that it represents the means of production of film has now fallen into the hands of the people.
This is really good fun. Its not especially new, but its new to me (and possibly to you!) and I thought it was worth a mention. RJDJ call it augmented audio and it blurs the relationship between the creator and the listener. They’ve made an iphone/itouch app that produces music which reacts to and changes with the environment around it including the sounds and movements made by the user. It creates a personalised soundscape. If that sounds pretentious, it isn’t. Its eery and spooky and discombobulating and strangely emotional and fun. I enjoyed playing with it.
One of the investors behind it is Stefan Glaezner who was first investor in Last.fm which he sold to CBS for $280m. I can’t see this business achieving that value (though hey, what do I know – Stefan’s investing record is a lot better than mine!) but I do think that some of the music being created on the app is rather beautiful – this is an early Brian Eno style amient recording of two little girls playing on a sunny afternoon. Its by Damian Stewart.
Despite being the least active sector for private equity in the last 12 months, media & communications companies can expect substantially more backing from institutional investors , says a survey from accountants and business advisers, Grant Thornton UK LLP.
The Grant Thornton survey reveals a high level of optimism over expectations of private equity activity in the UK media sector. Two-thirds of private equity investors expect to see activity levels increase in the UK media sector over the next 12 months. Only ten per cent of those surveyed predict a fall in activity levels, while 23 per cent expect deal flow to remain the same. A significant majority of respondents (90 per cent) plan to make further investments in the UK media sector over the next year.
According to the survey, 88 per cent have singled out online content as the most significant growth area. Consequently, 87 per cent believe investors will most aggressively target businesses operating in the digital niche.
“Given the tumultuous impact of digitalisation on the media sector, and the subsequent increase in demand from clients for marketing services that this has created, it is not surprising that the digital sub-sector is leading the M&A activity” added Bolton.
The second ranked target area for PE comapies is b2b publishers/events operators who enjoy more robust incomes than b2c companies.
The least attractive segments according to the report were music (which has intrinsic piracy problems and has been tainted in PE circles by Terra Firma’s unsuccessful purchase of EMI) & consumer publishing, as both areas are going through structural change which makes forecasting future earnings problematic for PE firms as they calculate exits, and television which is already heavily consolidated.
Viacom have announced that they are selling Harmonix, the company that makes Rock Band. Two years ago Rock Band and its close rival Guitar Hero were flying out of the shops and appeared to be a huge success. Even a year ago the magnificent The Beatles Rock Band game was released to huge effect. This year the music has slowed almost to a stop. And hence Viacom are preparing to pass the parcel.
US retail sales of these music genre games were $1.6m dollars in 2008 but will struggle to reach only $400m in 2010 according to games analyst Gamasutra .
Viacom bought Harmonix in 2006 as the music games market was fast growing. They paid $175m plus a further $150m to management in earnouts in 2007 as the market soared. Yet even at the peak of the trend Harmonix made no money from their investment. In 2008 they posted a $24million loss on $678million of revenue. The following year – even with The Beatles – revenues plunged by almost half to $362 million which caused a loss of $87 million. In the first 9 months of 2010 they recorded a loss of $316 million for the first nine months of 2010 on revenue of only $62 million as they wrote down their original investment.
Education is another area being revolutionised by the internet and the easy distribution of digital information. The University of Texas in San Antonio (UTSA) has recently opened the first completely bookless library on a university campus in the US. They made a film about it.
They have close to half a million e books & journals and students don’t have to wait for a book to become available because they can all access each text at the same. Two of the strengths of digital world are immediately apparent from this change; 0′s and 1′s take up far less space than physical objects and they can be accessed much much more easily by an unlimited number of people.
Online education is revolutionising the spread of information and good teaching. Academic Earth , I Tunes U and similar websites post lectures from world class universities that can be watched for free by anybody from anywhere around the world. If information is power, then that power is being put in the hand’s of the world’s poor and disadvantaged.
Online learning also allows students to go at their own pace and in their own space. For some that means that they can push themselves and learn more and more quickly. For others its a chance to go back and remind themselves of basic principles to catch up. In this week’s Economist, there is an article about how online learning allows children and adults who are too embarrassed to address their learning deficiencies in the real world are prepared to do so in the safety and privacy of online education.
There is a dark underbelly to this changing scene. At least if you are a publisher of academic text books. Their market, like all publishing, is under threat because the other key characteristic of 0′s and 1′s (the ease with which they can be copied and shared) means that the text book market is inevitably suffering as e books and other digital teaching materials are copied and shared. And as with all other digital content, content owners are not able to charge as much for a digital book as for a physical so even those books being sold are at generating less income. And if less income is generated, then publishers will have less money to invest in new high quality and up to date academic texts.
And demo the prototype of the Time Warner ipad app.
Its a miserable November day. Grey skies and rain lashing against the window panes. Thoughts turn to going back to bed and possibly something good on the TV.
Youview looks perfect. Unfortunately its not launching until first half of next year. Until then, here’s the ad:
Richard Halton, who is newly confirmed as CEO, described the service: “YouView is a brilliant new subscription-free TV service which combines the best TV with on demand services and internet content. We are creating an exciting consumer brand which will stand for a better TV experience for UK homes. Connected TV creates all kinds of creative possibilities, for existing networks as well as local services and new developers of interactive applications. It all adds up to great news for TV audiences. I look forward to working closely with the creative and developer communities to open up exciting possibilities for viewers to discover and enjoy content in new ways.”
Kip Meek, who is Chairman said: “YouView is key to ensuring that everyone in the UK benefits from next-generation TV and the UK has a competitive market. Viewers will get more choice whilst broadcasters and content providers both national and local will get a fantastic new means of finding audiences.”
The digital world of music “explained”
If you didn’t catch all of that, don’t worry, it will all be different tomorrow……
This is fandom taken to the extreme – a woman named Janice Whaley is attempting to re-record every Smiths song ever recorded by the end of the year. As if that wasn’t enough, she appears to be doing this with no instruments at all – just her voice layered and modulated. And all, apparently, whilst running after a toddler.
The interesting thing is that these are proper, interesting reinterpretations rather than straight covers. Some are incredibly haunting – listen to How Soon Is Now and tell me it’s not something special done this way.
She’s produced a handy widget which you should hopefully see below.
I would happily load these into my ipod.
Thanks to “Uncle Monty” on the marvellous Word Magazine website for bringing them to my attention.
