Do we have a problem looming with .ETH domain names?

If you’re not in the loop, you might have seen this trend on Twitter for people to post their .eth domain name in their username – e.g. basgras.eth in Bas Grasmayer’s case. The purpose of these domains is to provide a friendly, memorable URL for your Ethereum wallet, making payment transactions a little easier to resolve, because the actual address is a monstrous string of numbers and letters. If your .com domain is the memorable resolution name for the web server where your band’s website lives, the .eth domain is the same but for the band’s wallet. Or it should be anyway.

Ever one to stay across these things, I bagged motiveunknown.eth and figured at this point it might be wise to check some of our clients’ names. After all, securing this kind of IP is pretty important – all the more so when the domain is less about hosting a website and more about appearing to be the bona fide crypto wallet for a band or brand.

That’s when I learned with increasing alarm that every artist name I could think of had already been registered. Now, granted I might be doing some a huge disservice, but a quick poll around managers and colleagues concluded that none of these registrations were legitimate.

“So what?” you might ask. Well, if these are direct links into crypto wallets, the implication is that someone can pose as an artist and scam people into paying money direct to them. Someone could sell NFTs as the artist and receive funds into what appears to a layman to be the legitimate account.

Digging slightly deeper, the bigger problem is that I could not find any recourse for dealing with domain squatting. Given the far more anonymous nature of crypto in general, this could be a massive headache to address – and, if only based on me sitting there typing any artist name I could think of into the .eth domain search engine, not a single artist name is free to secure now.

I won’t claim to be an expert in this space – if anything I am at best a passionate novice, something I’ll be writing more about soon – but it strikes me that there might be a huge IP issue looming in this area in general. So, if you’re a manager, or an artist, or a label – anyone working with artists at all – you might want to look into securing your .eth domain now. At worst, it’s could be $100 you won’t get back; not a king’s ransom in the grand scheme. At best, it could be the equivalent to grabbing that crucial .com domain, with an ever-more central role in all things crypto and ecom. Don’t hang around on this one.

I moved house recently, and in doing so was finally able to get all my music, my mighty hifi setup and my office all combined into one. For me this is Shangri-La; now I get to blast whatever I like all day whilst working.

Having all my vinyl on tap got me passionate for LPs again, though the ever-escalating prices around them quickly dampened that enthusiasm when I realised you could buy an album on vinyl for £30, or just buy it on CD, second-hand, for £3.50, tops.

Consuming albums in both CD and LP format really made me realise something though, namely that the enjoyment of music is greatly enhanced by the rituals of selection that surround it – and indeed the things that in turn drive that ritual of selection itself.

Allow me to elaborate.

Visiting a music streaming service has always been a joyless experience for me, with a combination of weak algorithmic editorial and the paralysis of choice ensuring that my passion for listening to music seemed to ebb away the longer I had the app open.

By having a finite, physical selection of music around me, that joy of limited options and therefore more investment into one’s consequent choices means that I actually emotionally invest into whatever album I elect to play all the more. Even the physical act of pulling the chosen release off the shelf and putting it in/on your player of choice seems to commit you to listening that bit more. Or at least it does for me.

In truth, I think the physical format is less relevant; if I’m honest, I’m not a vinyl snob and most definitely take a view that a great album is a great album, irrespective of whether one owns it on vinyl, CD, cassette or whatever else.

What really enhances one’s joy from physical, in my view anyway, is simply that you tend to place more focus into what you choose to play, and in turn don’t get into ADHD-style track skipping or album hopping.

Of late, I’m listening to albums (and comps) end-to-end… and I’ve not felt as into music – as wholly passionate for it – in decades.

Adding to this passionate deep dive is the veritable smorgasbord of great books about music that have either just been released, or which I’ve discovered (or rediscovered). The stories these tell, the extra context they all bring, ensure that when you’re listening to music, you’re not just putting on some aural wallpaper to largely ignore. You’re deep into the record, the story, the entire world around that release.

One of my favourite books of all time is In Praise Of Slow by Carl Honoré. In it, the author argues a case for simply slowing the pace of life down, and enjoying the moment more. Anything from food to medicine to working is covered in separate chapters, but the over-arching message is simply to stop rushing to complete things, and instead enjoy the process. Savour it all.

That, to me, is where the real joy in listening to music comes in. Don’t rush; take time to select that record, stick it on, and just relax and take it all in.

These are simple pleasures, but in modern society we seem to have a fixation on having access to everything, all the time. Silicon Valley’s main focus is on scale – “all the music in the world at your fingertips!”, “10M books to choose from!” etc – but the victim of that is inevitably those deep connections to something that generate a lasting emotional impact.

Rejecting that entire state has never felt so good.

D.

(Typed whilst playing the legendary Macro Dub Infection Vol. 2 compilation that a pre-Bug Kevin Martin curated back in 1996)

If Covid pushed one thing right to the fore very abruptly, it was the entire concept of remote working. For me and my team, we had always been a semi-remote business, and we only ever worked together for two days a week, so we were blessed in that we were built for remote working such that – pub lunches aside – it didn’t really impact how we operated as a business at all.

As Covid dragged on, businesses – and workers – had to accept that remote working was actually possible, and this in turn has led to quite the debate as to how much it should be adopted now that things are easing.

For me though, the discussion of remote working is looking at the wrong things.

Businesses are asking whether it works for them operationally. Staff are asking whether it provides a greater work/life balance. But the issue is not so much whether remote working is possible; it is more about whether it is a good move for the business as a whole. Happy workers = better productivity in my view, and managers and MDs in general should ideally listen to their staff and consider whether, amid all this change, new ways to work should be explored.

As Covid lockdown went from weeks into months, we decided to embrace the remote working aspect of who we are as a business. So, we announced to our team that we would now consider ourselves fully remote, and that if people wanted to move out of London and base themselves further afield, they could.

However this also meant we could hire from further afield too – something we then proceeded to do when Bristol-based Tom joined our team.

One of our directors, Matt, even went a step further, moving to Spain before the Brexit drawbridge was pulled up. He’s now living in a lovely villa on a hillside near Malaga, and given the lousy UK summer we’ve just had, yes, we’re all a bit jealous.

It has also allowed more flexibility in the lives of our staff; this week Sadie is in Wales, whilst Asher is in Denmark. Both are working from their locations, and productivity isn’t affected at all.

So far, so good – but one thing we have also learned is that we all just miss the social side. That was always the actual reason we met up to work; truth is that we can do our job from anywhere, but it’s great to just hang out, have a laugh, perhaps grab some food and a drink together – all of that.

Also, some of our team felt it would be good to just meet up and work together now and then, purely because it can be a lot easier to, for example, walk someone through how to do something in person.

To address that, we now use The Halley over in Haggerston. Any member of staff can book a spot there, such that anyone can meet up and work together if they fancy it.

So, we now have options for our staff. They can work from home, or they can work from The Halley. But we are keen to stress that we’re not expecting them to be in the office space X days a week, and nor will we think less of people working from home all the time.

This, in my view, gets to the nub of the remote working debate. For me, this is about providing flexibility for your staff and allowing systems to come together that work. Happiness is a massive priority for me where staff are concerned, because I simply believe happier workers do better work, avoid stress and generally have a better quality of life. Hardly rocket science! So listening to them and finding options that allow a dynamic approach to working in general feels like the right thing to do.

For those running businesses, I’d simply say that it’s worth being open-minded and listening to your staff. Give them a voice and pay attention to what they’re saying. Of course, you cannot please everyone, but in my experience treating my staff fairly and positively also means they afford me the same courtesy back. Nobody is unreasonable and together I think we’ve found a path forward that might just work.

Oh – and on the social side, we’re planning to just have regular get togethers where we can have a great meal, talk a lot of nonsense, laugh loads (usually at someone’s expense, as is our way) and generally make merry. That’s invaluable – but it’s also a LOT of fun.

In recent times I’ve found that the #1 casualty of the streaming – and advertising – age has been the stories around music; that critical context that heightens your love of something from “casually enjoying” to “deeply connected”. Streaming platforms have largely stripped all the context out from music to just present songs as ‘artist name – track title” and not much more. Equally, advertising shifting almost entirely into the pockets of Google and Facebook has meant that many a music website has shut down or become highly marginalised as revenues went off a cliff. Some might call that progress, but these days I just call it a tragedy.

My means to address that change has largely been to immerse myself in seeking out books that really speak to the music I love, and in that respect Harry Sword’s Monolithic Undertow is something of a slam dunk. Subtitled In Search of Sonic Oblivion, the book bases itself around the powers of the drone, and how that has fed through the finest music since music existed.

Starting with Neolithic Maltese temples designed to turn chanted vocal into something significantly more powerful through extreme resonance, the book plots a path examining various chapters in musical history, from the Master Musicians of Joujouka to Tony Conrad and LaMonte Young, through to Popol Vuh, Swans, Sunn 0))), Coil, The Stooges, Brian Eno… you name it, they’re all in here.

In its own strange way, this book is a bit like Julian Cope’s mighty Copendium in that, once read cover to cover, you find yourself dipping back into a random chapter for inspiration. And inspiration is there in droves. There are a lot of artists I am aware of, but not overly familiar with. Spacemen 3 would be a case in point; friends liked them back in the day, but for whatever reason I never sought out their music.

Imagine the sheer joy then, of checking this band out only to learn that not only is their Dreamweapon album an absolute gem of a release, but that it was recorded live less then a mile from my house, in Brentford’s Waterman Arts Centre of all places.

It is interesting too, how much a book can have you revisiting artists you might have wrongly written off for one reason or another. Hawkwind are a case in point; I think I am semi-justified in not really delving deeply into their catalogue, as it has proven variable over the decades. Again though, with some refined guidance, one lands on their Space Ritual live album that truly reflected the group at their finest.

I could go on and on, naming albums and embedding links here, but that would miss the point. Monolithic Undertow to me is like an alternative history of rock n’ roll; of the real music that influenced the influencers. Every recommendation is pure gold, and along the way you will undoubtedly discover artists and albums you either missed completely, or were vaguely aware of but never truly invested time into.

I think there are very few books that I would argue should be on everyone’s bookshelf, but Monolithic Undertow is one of them. It is such a joy that even now I keep returning to delve into chapters. So much to learn, so much to discover. Frankly, I’m just glad books like this exist. We’re all the better with books like this – and authors like Harry – in the world, keeping that crucial context alive and celebrating what is truly amazing about music.

Grab your copy here.

On September 1st, Motive Unknown turned 10 years old. For me, the time has flown past in many respects; certainly it feels like yesterday that I was starting out, taking on a (then) brand new signing called alt-J as my first client, via Korda Marshall’s Infectious label.

Cut to today, and Motive Unknown is a company of 11 people, with a client roster that counts amongst it a huge number of indie labels and artists and/or management companies.

To mark the occasion, I am going to do a “10 for 10” series: ten posts, each on different topics around things I’ve learned and experienced in the decade I’ve had running the company.

For now, as an aperitif of sorts, I thought I’d list ten things I’ve learned in all that time, both about running a business but also about working in the music industry.

1. Be Kind

This might well sound like the most obvious (or even naive) statement to make, but kindness is something seen as a weakness in business, as if to be kind is also to be a sucker to be taken advantage of.

I firmly disagree.

In general, I find that profit often sits above kindness. Many awful decisions are made based purely on what will generate the most money. I feel lucky in that my father is a successful businessman in the construction industry, and he always ran his company with a sense of fairness. There was no “us and them” between senior staff and the junior members of the team.

This stuck with me in running Motive Unknown. There have been countless instances where, had I so desired, we could have screwed someone over or generally behaved in a manner that was morally off-centre. And, whilst I am no angel and certainly have made some bad decisions along the way, I would like to think that I’ve valued those around me and tried wherever possible to act with compassion and understanding.

2. Take care of yourself

Another perpetuated myth in starting a business is that you should work 24/7 and be prepared to put it all on the line if you want to succeed. I think it’s safe to say that I fully bought into this concept – and the end result was a biblical burnout which led to persistent anxiety attacks and, eventually, a nasty bout of depression.

I once remember talking to my Dad about my then line manager at my job (back before I worked in the music industry). This guy used to make much of the fact that he worked every night until 10pm. I recounted this to my father, who listened and then said “well… he’s a bloody idiot. If he can’t even manage his own time and his department such that he’s not working until 10pm every night, what kind of manager is he??”

On this, I now realise, my Dad was 100% correct. Fuck working 24/7. Work smart. Being broken on the wheel of your job isn’t a badge of honour; in my view it is quite the opposite.

Often I think people just like to perpetuate the “work 24/7 to make it” myth because they did that and feel everyone else should suffer just as much. But ask yourself this: who has had the last laugh, the person who worked smart and achieved a lot with a keen work/life balance, or the one who did 100hr weeks? If you feel it is the latter, you’ve fallen for the myth.

Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t to say that long hours can always be avoided, or that you can have everything your way. You can’t. And even worse, your sheer passion for what you do might have you working crazy hours without even realising.

But understand this: you have limits, and unfortunately a lot of the signs of burnout come just a little too late. Be attuned to that, and never be scared to recognise it and take action.

3. Seek the counsel of others

If, like me, you are the sole owner of a business, it can be oddly isolating at times. The Stormzy-endorsed maxim of “heavy is the head…” can certainly ring true. Equally, I think maybe worries about money and other matters might scare you away from closely involving others in the business.

In reality of course, the wisest thing a person can do is find wise people and seek their counsel.

To this day, I still remember when PR ran that Motive Unknown was launching. I received an email from Jonathan at RetroFuzz, with a simple statement. “We’ve been where you are, so if you ever need help with anything, just ask.” I’d worked with J and Matt a few times and concluded they were great guys, achieving a huge amount all on their own terms. So, this offer meant the world, and sure enough through the years I did indeed seek their advice on anything from hiring people through to mundane things like tax and accounting. And, they always gave that advice willingly too, despite there being no gain in it for them (reinforcing point 1 above!). For that, I remain eternally grateful and they should rest assured their karma is well and truly in balance.

Over time, Tom Packer and Matt Cheetham, my fellow directors here at MU, have become my consiglieri and, to my relief, happily challenge me on all manner of things. I am better for having their support, and collectively we are a better business with the three of us as its central brain trust.

So, don’t fear seeking the counsel of others. Be mindful whose advice you seek out, for sure, but wise people aren’t that hard to spot in my opinion.

4. Surround yourself with smart people, and ideally, hire people smarter than you.

I think it is a natural human response to feel intimidated by people who are on some level smarter than you. Here’s the thing though: hiring people smarter than you will only ever do you the world of good. Why? Because the reality is a quid pro quo; by employing these people and giving them space to do their best possible work, everyone wins.

I remain grateful for the teams I have around me for this reason. They’re all ferociously smart people – and the great thing is that they’re all on my team!

5. Understand that running a company is a two-way street, and you must work to ensure your staff are supported wherever possible.

Something I see a lot are companies where the person who owns/runs it takes a kind of dictatorial stance. “I am the boss, don’t you dare question me!” – that kind of thing. This is compounded in the music business by a frankly outmoded notion that everyone should be grateful to work in it, which in turn creates a sense that everyone is replaceable and therefore entirely abuseable.

This is utter, utter bullshit, and never fails to enrage me.

OK, so I started Motive Unknown, but I am nothing without my team. And if my team’s job is to work to make the best of Motive Unknown, my job is to work to make the best of my team.

In real terms, that means ensuring they are always progressing, that they always feel supported, that they feel they have a voice, and that they feel they have the best environment in which to do their work.

We are a small company and I’m only human, so I don’t necessarily succeed, and in truth it might be wiser to ask any of the Motive Unknown team how I’ve fared in that regard, but I’d like to think I do a pretty decent job of it. The fact we’ve not had a single resignation from the company for something like 4 years now is maybe a testament to that.

6. Question everything.

I nearly quoted Timothy Leary for this, but I think the “Believe nothing…” part is perhaps up for debate as to its wisdom. If I’ve learned one thing through the years, it is that people love to find trusted models and then work them to their absolute death. The music business is particularly bad on this front, with accepted wisdom on a topic often being sorely out of date and in need of revision.

Motive Unknown has succeeded because at every point along the way, we essentially ignored what everyone else was doing and simply asked “what, with a blank sheet start on this, would be the best way to solve this problem?”.

Embracing slightly heretical thinking is no bad thing. The people who really got somewhere in the world did not do so by following the herd; they dared to think differently. Be more like that: you’d be amazed where it can get you.

Also, even when you’ve found new ways of doing things, never forget to challenge even those ways after a while. This world moves fast, and you have to stay at the front if you don’t want to get trampled underfoot.

7. Never lose sight of your own dreams and aspirations in life

At the start of 2020, I was in a bit of a fug, so decided to engage the services of a professional coach, Tom Pinchard. I hesitate to use the term “life coach” not least because something about that makes me cringe (and possibly Tom too!), but yes – a person whose role is to just gently push you along into getting over obstacles and achieving the things you have maybe talked a lot about but done little to ever realise.

These coaching sessions have taught me a lot, but probably the #1 thing I learned is that I had lost sight of what I was running a company for. By which I mean: professional success is all well and good, but if you’ve achieved that, what are you doing with your life?

In my case, I realised that work had come before all else, and that it was time to make work deliver things back to me. Perhaps the biggest thing on that front was moving house, finally buying a place we adore as a family, but it also encapsulated other, simpler, things: making music again, getting fit, losing weight… all goals I’d talked about forever and never really taken action on.

Cut to today and it’s safe to say I’m probably a perfect case study for Tom. I’ve moved house. I’m about 13kg lighter. I’ve made something like 30 tracks, a process which has brought me enormous pleasure (and I might yet get around to releasing them!), I exercise daily and – to the immense bewilderment of my family – really love boxing as my keep fit method of choice.

Without Tom diplomatically kicking me up the backside to focus on these things and see them through, I wouldn’t have managed it. But my point here is not so much “hire a coach” so much as “outside of your day job, focus on what you want to achieve, whatever that may be”. It doesn’t matter what the ‘thing’ is; just focus on it and make it happen, because to do so balances your life and introduces a lot more happiness and satisfaction to it. It also inevitably contributes to a better work/life balance, and that is never a bad thing. You only get one life – don’t waste it all working.

8. If you work in music, never, ever forget what it is to be a fan

A sad reality of the music business is that it can wear you down pretty quickly. It is also very easy to get sucked into the cultural bubble of your office. The end result of this is often a disconnection from the very things that got you into music in the first place.

Fans are not cash cows to be milked. They’re actually your employers. Without them, you wouldn’t even have a job.

So, if you work in marketing as I do, don’t sit there with a mindset of “what will make the most money here?”. Ask instead “what will the fans really love?” After all, connecting with fans generates goodwill, and that in turn means those fans will support your artist all the way. This is karma at play once more: don’t be a dick, treat fans well and – shock horror – you will build something infinitely more long-lasting and meaningful.

Of course, labels are there to make money. Often though I think they win the battle but lose the war. Yes, you might have succeeded in cynically selling a ‘deluxe’ version of the album that is actually the same record with 10 different covers, which will doubtless help the chart position of the artist in week one, but seriously, is this how you create long-term value with fans? Of course it isn’t. Don’t be that person. Remember those moments of complete euphoria you felt discovering bands, or hearing them deliver the set of a lifetime, and focus on making every artist’s fanbase feel that as much as possible. That’s the real victory here.

9. Get financially smart

This might be the most Dad-ish thing to include here, but here’s the crux of it: I realised, far, far too late that had I bothered to engage a financial advisor and generally work to understand money a lot more, I might be about £100,000 wealthier today.

You can only earn so much money, but it is what you then put that money to doing for you that really counts. Now granted, if you run a business there are innumerable benefits to take advantage of on that front, but even if you are not in that position, there’s a lot to be learned out there.

Not learning more about money is something I really regret now. It always felt very uncool to me, as if learning more on that front would turn me into some kind of besuited Tory voter. Nothing could be further from the truth, and the joke is on me for not wising up sooner. Don’t make the mistakes I did: get smart about money ASAP, even if you’re fresh out of Uni and starting your first job. You won’t regret it, and believe me that the positive financial actions you take earlier in your professional career are the ones that will benefit you the most later in life.

10. If you’re doing well, recognise that and pay it forward

I am all too aware that Motive Unknown has been extremely lucky to have not just survived the pandemic without having to make redundancies, but to have actually grown due to the increased demand for expertise in the digital realm. However for some, this has been 18 months of pure hell.

One of our clients through the years was a venue here in London. To say they have had a hard time would be a massive understatement. So, it felt only right to reach out to them when they were reopening to ask if we could help them, gratis, with anything they might need in the way of marketing support etc in order to get restarted again.

Music is an interconnected web of cultural touchpoints. The music, the venues, the writers covering it, the websites posting those pieces, the stores… they’re all parts in a bigger puzzle that combine to deliver some of the most affecting and life-changing moments we can ever experience. So if you’re one of the businesses that has done well, it is important to recognise when others are struggling and to help them along. If we cannot show basic compassion on that front, we have nothing.

I hope that might have proved useful on some level to somebody. If not, thank you for reading all the way to this point anyway!

More soon…

I have felt for a while now that it was possibly time to restart blogging; something (on a personal level) I’ve not done since around 2014 or thereabouts.

So, whilst the old blog content remains (and makes for an interesting read all these years later where industry commentary is concerned!), the blog has now moved to a new domain with a new design too.

Why “Every Spoil Is A Style”? The name is the title of a chapter from one of my favourite books: Michael E. Veal’s Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae. It was a phrase used to describe dub, and it massively resonated with me as someone who prefers the imperfection in things in general. From every mistake, every mis-step, potentially comes something new and wondrous. It also speaks to the contrarian in me, loving as I do to swim in the opposite direction to the masses in a bid to find the next opportunity or space to establish something.

With that in mind, returning to writing in 2021 seems somehow right. It’s an itch that needs scratching, and for me re-establishing the old WordPress-powered blog rather than whichever trendy platform is in vogue right now also feels satisfying. I built a company on pushing artists to empower themselves as much as possible, and so now I’m just adhering to that same philosophy.

I am aware that for some people, visiting a website is something they might plan to do, but often forget about. So, add your email to the Subscribe box and you will receive new articles straight to your inbox as soon as they’re live.

Onward!!

Having said that, I feel there’s an awkward question that has to be asked, namely: why, in Spotify’s Browse section, are 99.9% of the playlists Spotify’s own?

If you’re not familiar, Browse is the “uninformed” discovery section – the editorial area where Spotify can push playlists of its choosing. At the top are more day-to-day relevant playlists, and further down are various mood-related starting points which then offer a variety of playlists to choose from.

Here’s the Browse section today (click to enlarge):

Of all the playlists shown there, only the BBC’s Playlister one in the centre isn’t made by Spotify.

Scroll down, and you get mood-related jump-off points to explore playlists. I selected the “Chill” mood, and this is what I get (again, click to enlarge):

Every single playlist on that screengrab above is made by Spotify. Check out any of the mood playlists and the results are the same: the only playlists being pushed (with *very* rare exception) are Spotify’s own. Indeed, checking out the Top Lists section, I had to get to the 46th playlist on the page before I was looking at one not created by Spotify.

To me, this is a problem, for a couple of reasons. Spotify are certainly encouraging artists to build connected audiences on their platform, and the #1 means to do this is by curating playlists that give fans more reasons to connect with you beyond just the artist catalogue. Many artists are doing this too; there’s a definite logic at work, not least because when you build followers on the artist profile in particular, those people are all notified when a new release goes up. Ergo, this is a sensible way to build a strong response from the moment a new track, single, EP or album goes live.

The problem though, is that if Spotify themselves aren’t liable to support your playlist, you are left to use the artist’s own social media platforms to drive awareness. And, with Facebook in particular having an organic reach problem of sorts, that might well also mean spending money to drive people to Spotify via promoted posts.

Now, in and of itself, that’s not a bad thing. Building an audience does require time and, yes, money. However my issue here is that Spotify has a large editorial section in which they could support artist playlists… and instead they’re only promoting their own.

Of course, a counterpoint here is that Spotify *are* supporting artists, because they’re adding them to their own playlists. That argument is correct, and having your artist’s song added to one of their larger playlists may well have a transformative effect.

This however brings me to my second point: that of Spotify favouring their own playlists whilst encouraging people to create their own. In many respects, it reminds me of Twitter’s now infamous about-face with 3rd party clients. At the outset, when it worked for Twitter to have developers building countless clients for their platform and driving adoption, access was unlimited. Over time though, Twitter realised they would do better to control all access and drive it through their own clients so that they could push adverts and increase revenues. Support for 3rd party clients was cut to a near-unusable state, and as such that entire ecosystem is bordering on extinction.

Put simply: one could say that it feels rather like artists (and others) are being encouraged to create playlists and drive users to Spotify, only to then find that on the platform those playlists see little or no support whatsoever.

Spotify is an audio platform. Its primary function is to provide an unlimited supply of music; that is what people sign up for. Discovery is another area entirely. On the “informed discovery” front, the company now has Echo Nest on board to drive recommendations for you based on what you’ve listened to. However in the Browse section, where what you have is human-curated editorial, Spotify have decided that they should be virtually the sole curator (with minimal exception) of this unlimited music supply. To me, that’s a bad move. They have a chance to represent an insane amount of content created by some of the finest curators out there. Instead, they’re doing it all themselves and shutting out the opportunities for others.

I was talking to an artist manager recently about playlists, suggesting that his artist create some to drive connections on the platform. “Why?”, came the response, “They never support them anyway! Their entire editorial is their own playlists, not artist ones”.

He has a point – and to my mind, that needs to change.

A recent article for The Guardian went behind the scenes at Radio 1’s playlisting meeting, chatting with those on the current selection board and generally revealing how decisions on what’s goes on there are made. Unsurprisingly, social media stats get referenced a fair bit, with YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other public data being considered when discussing whether or not an artist should win a spot on the station’s playlist. Whilst exceptions are made (Clean Bandit are referenced as an example, where online stats remain low but R1 has still opted for support), by the end of the article the writer concludes that “it all feels so soulless”, lamenting the days when Peel could play what he wanted and took risks.

(I think the first myth to debunk here is that Peel ever represented the output of Radio 1. Whilst Peel was blowing my mind with weird combinations of Napalm Death, The Fall and even a band called Mousefart, the primary output of The Nation’s Favourite was still “characters” like Dave Lee Travis and Simon Bates. Whatever state Radio 1 is in now, I think we should remember that once upon a time the daytime output included a man who built a career on a sound effect that went “Quack quack oops!”. But I digress…)

For those of us working in the music industry, Radio 1’s obsession with public stats has long been a bone of contention. The main reason is because at different times it felt like that focus on the public stats was myopic. There’s also been whispers that labels were buying “fans”, views, likes or whatever other metric was rife, with marketing departments simply putting down £100 for 100k views so their plugger could then rock up to the R1 producers and excitedly squeal “just LOOK at those numbers!”.

My own argument for some time has been that where Radio 1 is concerned, the tail is now wagging the dog. Entire campaigns are being constructed around getting “the numbers” up so that R1 will take notice and consider playlisting something. I’ve seen panic creep across the faces of label heads in meetings when the plugger has “reliably” informed them that Ergatoudis and co were now looking at Shazam, when we’d bet the house on Facebook. For that crime we might as well have been marketing to Kazakhstan such was the perceived misfire we believed we were now staring in the face.

Catch me in a pub in recent years and I’d have ranted that Radio 1 are now telling people like me how to do our jobs; which platforms to focus on and what stats to build. To some extent, that is true: I’ve had many a plugger come back and report that “the Facebook numbers just aren’t high enough” or “you lost out because X had more YouTube views”. I’ve also had instances where the response to that was to cynically create something specifically to drive fan likes or view counts up. It all feels so wrong: like the epicentre of the campaign is not the fans and building a fanbase for the artist, but Radio 1 and pleasing them by whatever means we can.

Here’s the thing though: in recent months I’ve realised that the problem here isn’t Radio 1. The problem is the record labels – and, rather horrifyingly, people like myself: the marketing wonks strategising campaigns.

Why? Because at some point, a paranoia has crept over labels around Radio 1. Everything has to involve public stats, otherwise we have Absolutely No Chance. I still think this is why mailing lists have fallen by the wayside, despite all research to date suggesting that emails are infinitely better at converting people to action than any social media platform. (Hell, even the social media giants use email. There’s a reason Facebook emails you to say your friend commented on your status, or Twitter emails you to say someone sent you a direct message: its because they know you take action on it.) Ask most labels about their email list though, and you might well be met with a bemused stare, as if you were asking about sending postcards to the fan club or something equally outdated.

Focussing on public stats is looking at marketing the wrong way. Those kind of results should be the consequence of your marketing, but not necessarily the sole intent. Or put another way: if the only reason you are marketing your artist is to add likes or plays or whatever, rather than to simply present the artist and their work first and foremost, you’re going about this the wrong way. Furthermore, I don’t think you’ll hoodwink Radio 1 either.

This is why I think the marketing people are to blame in this equation. Over time the focus has switched to simply driving up social media numbers without real care for the bigger picture and the degree to which artists are genuinely building a fanbase. Advertising and promotion has become a brute-force tactic which may give you those numbers on certain platforms, but which hasn’t actually built a fanbase. There’s a world of difference between adding fans and adding genuine, ardent paying fans – the ones who will buy your release, or stream it relentlessly or buy gig tickets etc. In the race for quantity, the quality got lost.

So why am I choosing edIT’s followup, Certified Air Raid Material over his debut? Because its pretty much where edIT took the gloves off and aimed squarely for your head with monstrous, tight production and a fairly nonstop flow of top-dollar belters. Its as if edIT sat there and thought “Oh you want it full-on? YOU GOT IT”. With the opening intro skit “I Slay Crowds” the man born Edward Ma sets out his stall – and when it leads into “Battling Go-Go Yubari In Downtown LA”, the intent is clear here: edIT’s come to blow your head off.

Something that never ceases to amaze me is how tight the production is on this record. Its still one of those gold standard records by which I judge the quality of a audiophile setup. The control over sound here is surgical, with the basslines and kicks designed to rattle your head and hit you right in the throat.

For me edIT tracks a strange line back to the dub pioneers of the 70s. Those guys were the crowned masters of playing with sound; of tossing a noise or sound effect into the air and teasing it out – spinning it up and away from the rest of the music in a strange, alchemic kind of manner. On both his albums, edIT does the same. Everything is played with. Melodies reverse, stutter, loop into quarter bars and more, making the whole listening experience juddering, slightly woozy and utterly fucking incredible.

Whilst this album is largely instrumental, one of the few vocal tracks on it delivers lyrics so good that if I could get a poster made of them, I’d hang them on the wall of my office. Artsy Remix sees The Grouch step up to deliver a vicious beatdown of pretentious types, all set against a fucking devastating skating synth and a kick drum that – at the right volume – makes your throat twitch:

You ain’t artsier than me
Cuz you got sideburns and a vintage tee
I said you ain’t artiser than me
Cuz you pluck a guitar, that ain’t fuckin bizarre
You ain’t artsier than me
Cuz you live in Los Feliz, bitch you ain’t Jesus
You ain’t artsier than me
I got a colorful vocab, watch the low jab

This isn’t an MC bragging his greatness; quite the opposite – to me he’s just setting out that he’s a guy getting on with his world and fuck the pretence: “I’m a humanoid too / and if you’re cool with me then I’ll look past the void in you / instead of through”. Every time I play the song it has me feeling like I could punch the air and scream “FUCK YES!!” – which, let’s be frank, is always a good thing.

Following Artsy is the title track from the album. In some respects, this song summarises the shift from Crying Over Pros to the New Aggressive edIT. Beginning with some soft guitar getting reversed and generally pulled apart, the song keeps you interested enough… and then it stops. “Alright you little bitches – AIR RAID!” yells a female voice, and then BANG: in drops a twisting, turning bassline that summarises perfectly why edIT is a masterful producer. Its controlled, yet ferocious. Above all, its totally sublime.

If funk in a track is derived less from the notes that are there and more from those that aren’t, edIT steps up throughout this album. Songs don’t so much groove as lurch, leaving sound or silence hanging and teasing you. In some respects, it bears similar hallmarks to the sparse earlier work of the Neptunes, where it feels like there’s maybe only 3 or 4 sounds in each song, despite there no doubt being far, far more. Straight Heat is another fine example. The drums aren’t funky in themselves, but answering the call to “gimme a funky ass bassline!”, a staccato organ riff drops in with the bass that just patches the whole thing together into one massive, dirty, swaying masterpiece.

Sometimes – rarely, but once in a blue moon – an album comes along that is as much a pleasure to listen to because of its production as it is for the quality of the songs. Its like seeing a film that’s as much a rollercoaster ride because of the FX and surround sound as for the plot (an equally rare thing in my experience); there’s pleasure just in the aural experience of the album itself. Certified Air Raid Material fits that bill for me: hearing it isn’t just amazing because the songs are astonishing – its amazing because the sheer experience of listening is so exhilarating.

Enough words. Dig in below – and crank it up as high as you can, right from the start.

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