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Saturday at The Great Escape

Andy — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:23:19 +0000

School of Seven Bells

White Denim

Thursday at The Great Escape 09

Andy — Fri, 15 May 2009 10:28:31 +0000

A quick round up of Thursday nights tinnitus inducing musical goodness.

The Males – mainly female, managed to catch their last to songs at Horatio’s. It would have been more were it not for the length of Brighton pier.

Fanfarlo – The Recommender blog postulated these guys might be the next Arcade Fire. Slow to start but got going towards the end with extra drums, horns, clarinet, xylophone and keys.

The Answering Machine – good to bump into turner to watch these boys (and girl) play. A real shame that a larger crowd couldn’t make the effort because these guys packed a very tight punch and should have deserved more. Needless to say, watch out because this indie pop 4 piece is coming your way.

The Rumble Strips – I thought I knew more Rumble Strips than I actually do. Turns out its all good though. Was good to get some horns into the evening.

The Maccabees – beyond words. Everything I expected and more. Sodden t-shirts all round. Did all the classics but no Seventeen Hands, so the t-shirt will have to be saved for another day.

Delegates Only

Andy — Thu, 14 May 2009 12:32:21 +0000

The atrium at the Thistle Hotel, we even get free tea and coffee this year, although I’m much more interested in where the man carrying a case of red stripe is going.

Initial thoughts: lots of fringe and skinny jeans, and lots of kids with delegate passes – either the super early bird bargain deal is catching on or they’re in bands. In either case I’m looking remarkably old and uncool.

First talk of the day, with Will Page and Eric garland from PRS and BigChampagne respectively, chaired by peter bazalgette. Talked about the long skinny tail of demand in the digital music markets. Turns out that illegal markets behave in very much the same way to legal ones, with most of the downloads following the big hits. Inhibitors to supply remain artists and labels that won’t release tracks digitally, eg The beatles. Inhibitors to demand are the attention cost of discovering music. Both legal and illegal channels do not allow us to ‘discover’ new music but instead just continue to spoon feed us ‘the hits’. The article has been published today available for download free from the PRS music website.

It seems to me that the future is social and there needs to be means by which people can discover rather than searching for something they’ve been directed to. Also of note was a comment from a representative of Music Ally who pointed out that in a forthcoming piece of research from them that the filesharing is decreasing -possibly as a result to users turning to easier legal methods like Spotify, but more on that tomorrow.