The blog has moved to Cashbox and Record World

 Yes as you can see I haven't updated the blog for a long time here. I haven't been inactive though is just that most of the entrance was always published in Cashbox Canada and Record World. In the end I started to post them first here, then on the other sites. Then we changed and everything went on first on Cashbox and Record World. Then many readers moved so updating here was just another thing that I needed to do. I feel it's time to have it all on Cashbox Magazine Canada, Record World International. I won't be updating anything here any longer.

Just follow these links and just subscribe to their newsletter and you can follow me there. Every week with a new story around my life in the record industry.

Cashbox Magazine Canada

Record World International

regards

Peter  

Do You Really Own Your Fanbase?

 Let me guess if you are an artist, you don’t have a homepage. Or your homepage is not updated! How can I tell? In the past few days, I have been adding independent artists to both my festival Future Echoes and our radio station Cashbox Radio. And I’m usually surprised when an artist really has a homepage. If it’s updated with the latest, I’m really impressed. Most do not this and it had made my work so hard.

You don’t need a homepage some artist tell you. We have our social media, that is where the fans are hanging out.

There is a problem with this. You actually own a website and you decide how it should be presented and also have the opportunity to collect the fans there. The ugly truth with social media is that you don’t own your followers, they are actually owned by Facebook, Tiktok, and other multi-national companies. They just let you have access to your own fans for a little bit. In reality, they actually let you pay to reach your own followers by paid messages. Think about it, a post in these networks only reaches around 10% of your fanbase, if you pay you can reach more.

“The big artists use it!” But they build their fanbase somewhere else. Let’s take Taylor Swift for example. Her career is over ten years old and people have invested millions of dollars in order for her to be exposed in real media and in concerts to get her fanbase. For her, the social media is already there, whatever new social media that is opening her fans will adopt her on that new social media. You can see this phenomena even with the dead artists that really are not on social media. You will find the Ramones on Facebook even though all of them are dead. That is because they have a real fanbase. The fans create this for them. If you already have a huge fanbase social media is working. Even here, Taylor Swift doesn’t reach as many either with her posts, but her superfans are following and they will spread the word for her. To be honest, she also has so much money she has a budget to pay Facebook to reach more.

To build a fanbase you can’t rely on these networks. They can go down or you can be kicked like Donald Trump. For those of you that remember MySpace or ICQ, artists spent money and time building up a fanbase in several of these networks and then they suddenly close down, and you lose everything. Or you post something and suddenly you are banned.

Even if you don’t believe that Tiktok will one day disappear, these networks really don’t provide what is needed. For example, how do I get your latest bio on Tiktok? Or even a good press picture. Sure, I can send you a message on Tiktok and hope that someone will answer my request. You know what? I don’t have time to wait for your pictures or bio, I just moved on to the next artist where I could easily find it. You just missed your opportunity.

What do you need to own your fanbase? When I spoke to experts, they really pointed off that hard value for companies like Facebook and Tiktok are phone numbers. When you have that you get in the face of the person. You can send a message and it will pop up on their screen. That is why all of these services have an App. It’s not for your convenience it’s to be able to send push notifications right up on your screen. And even if you are paying, they would never let you be able to send push notifications to your fans through their systems. That is exclusive for them to decide when and where you will get this.

If you have the phone number for the fan, that is another story. You can with a message reach them directly. Second best is of course e-mail. Good old newsletters are more efficient than any of the social media platforms, if you want to upgrade you just send a personal email. That won’t be lost, it will go straight into the fan mailbox and that will pop up on their mobile screen.

On the homepage, you can easily set up systems that allow you to get this info. You just get a form and people can get your newsletter and make the format, so you get the essentials like email, phone number, name and what country. That fanbase is owned by you. When you negotiate with a record label or a festival or gig, if you can tell them that you can reach this amount of people in their area you have something to negotiate with and offer. If you tell them that you have 100,000 followers on Facebook they know you won’t even reach the right targets. Yes, I get a lot of artists telling me that if they get booked on my festival, they will promote themselves on Facebook. Ok, so you are telling me you will let my festival be seen bu 10% of your followers and you are from the other side of the planet. Not a good deal.

Yes, you need a homepage. You don’t need to update it every day. Just keep it updated with the latest info that is important and check it when you do a release. What you need on a homepage is bio, press pictures, tour schedule, links to your music and forms for fans to start following you and a contact. Of course, you need to keep these fans happy by sending stuff, but hey you are already doing that work on social media but won’t really get anything out of it.

Original text on Cashbox Canada

Rethink The Strategy - What The Artist Needs To Learn!

 

I just saw a local government that is supporting local artists doing another meet-up. This time it was that their local artists should learn social media. It’s nice for the artist that they get a chance to learn something around the business. Still, it won’t help their career. Social media today is so advanced that the normal artist really can’t be their own social media manager. This course will just get them some small tip-offs and people think that they can do it on their own.

Instead, if they were serious about it, they should hire a social media manager. The artist will have enough problems to keep up with all that content that should be produced then be able to follow up on the information they got from that government sponsor meeting. In the end, the information they get is old by the time that meeting is over. To handle social media today you need to follow the trends and be active all the time to find out about the new functions and what is working. That is a professional's job. Either the artist must choose from being an artist or a social media manager. There is a reason even small businesses hire a social media manager.

I see this as a trend in many things. We think since many things now have been pushed over to the artists to take care of, we should educate them in these things. Sorry to say that is really counter-productive. If you have a factory you don’t teach all your employees to drive the trucks. Not all the employees can run all the machinery in the factory and all of them cannot have an economic education. No, the factory is run like a team. You are hired because you are a specialist in something. I see too much of this new Covid stuff is to teach everybody everything which leads to that you just know a bit of everything when you really need the deeper information.

It’s nice that people get information. The problem is that we don’t have unlimited money to build up the industry after Covid. What these artists need is the tool to build their own teams, not learning what the team is doing. The artist is the one that makes the product the music. Which is the essential part of the whole operation. My beliefs are though do what you are really good at. There is a good reason why I don’t write the songs I promote. I am really not good at writing songs. And a two-hour seminar on writing music won’t get me to be the next big thing in songwriting. I will only be good at it if spend hours and hours writing songs and will get better. I had a bigger interest in the music business, so I have spent countless hours learning that and became an expert in that area.

Last week I saw another seminar on how to place your music in movies. Most of the attendees didn’t have the background information of the legal aspects of the quality of the recordings to even send to these supervisors. The same stands true here, there are professionals working in this area. It would have been so much easier to just hook up the artists to them or these services instead of going to the top and try to contact the artist supervisors directly.

In the end, most of the logistics inside the music industry are very personal. The strategy for Metallica looks way different than the strategy for Taylor Swift. By trying to teach something that is just working on the surface is a waste of time. In reality, the artist just looks for someone that can take care of all this stuff that is needed. They want to focus on being artists and getting their expressions out. The idea of teaching people is not wrong but right now it’s aimed at the totally wrong source. You won’t get a better artist on doing this you will just end up with people feeling confused and demoralized that they can’t handle all the things that are going on all the time.

You are not building a music infrastructure in this way. Rethink and do it right. What is needed now is not another course, it is networking. These artist needs to know where they should find the people that can handle these tasks, not learning a small part of the task and think that is enough. The artist needs to learn what they should expect by hiring a professional, not what they are doing. They also need to learn to hire the right people for the right job.

Original text on Cashbox Canada

Don’t Fear The Mistakes. Just Do The Right Ones.

 

One of the bands I work with once said, “Better to do something than do nothing at all”. Another quote is the circus owner Phineas T. Barnum that said, “There's no such thing as bad publicity”. Of course, in the worst situations, there is bad publicity and doing things totally wrong. In most cases, it’s not. And I feel many withhold themselves just by being afraid making a mistake.

Doing nothing is really safe, I can admit that. Progression wise though it’s pure stupidity. Without taking chances you are not going further. My biggest successes have been through mistakes. Also, a lot of knowledge comes from making mistakes. There is a difference between making mistakes and making mistakes.

I sent out a newsletter today. It was very fast because I had just two hours between two different quite important panels and today was the last day we could get the letter out before we got new numbers to send to in our mailing system. Of course, I had to put things together in no time. No chance to double-check. Not even the links and spelling were just through the spelling program.

So, I had a choice. Send it off and see it as a promotion thing. Or just abandon the opportunity to make some noise for my festival?

I was more like, well if there are any mistakes, who cares? it’s just one of the hundreds of newsletters that I send out in a year. And the promotion is more important than the safety of having someone going through it. And in a newsletter that is over three pages long, there will be mistakes, especially when you don’t have time to proof read and just copy and paste and adding things.

Off it goes. And of course, I see an error in the header that is not corrected by the spelling program just as it went off. Well, what the heck it’s not that it can be misunderstood just a wrong letter.

That is the thing, if I feared the mistake there would be no promotion. In today's media, everything goes very fast. I worked for a company that had that problem. The boss was a very weak leader and afraid of any mistakes. By that, we only sent out two press releases a year, of course, went through 20 people for corrections and proofing. The problem was that it never went well because people tended to forget about the company in all these times that went by each message. In the fast lane we live in today you just have to go ahead in more cases than just sit on the break.

Then a mail came in from an artist that has applied to the festival. With just the line “Please spell right”. The funny part is this is an artist we booked for another festival I worked with. He and his so-called manager was a pain in the ass the whole time so we never rebooked him. They didn’t understand jack shit about how the industry worked. He was a running joke in the booking department of old farts that shouldn’t be playing music any longer. He used to be a big artist in his home country, but that was over thirty years ago, and he still thinks he is some kind of star. With 197 followers on YouTube, I rest my case.

Of course, this is a real mistake. Just give me a reason to reject your application and you get rejected. I even deleted his address from the system, so he won’t ever get any mail about opportunities that we give out from time to time.

So I leave you with another line that one of the talented bands I work with wrote “I'd rather be wrong if they are right.”

Original text on Cashbox Canada

I Am Missing the Special Bond with the Artists

 

I have been spending a lot of time on online conferences again. Last year I did over 30 of them and now they are becoming frequent again. But online conferences will never replace the real meetings at an “in-person" conference. One thing has really stood out though during these times. The online world is a much harder place for the artist to connect and get anything done.

Too many of the people I meet at these conferences are doing two serious mistakes. Mistakes I personally also do, so it’s a human thing. Either they contact everyone they just see at the conference, more or less just asking the person if they have an opportunity for them. A hard question since I haven’t checked you out or know what you are doing. The other mistake is just hanging around and really not presenting yourself to anybody. You feel that you don’t have anything to offer so you mainly just sit there and wait for the persons that contact everybody to show up. In the end, the match between these two is non-existent.

This is the backside of online conferences. My best thing has been talking to people finding them interesting and in the end, we find common ground and do some business. This process can take years of meetings and at the end of it, it’s about the chemistry between you and the other person. You have to like the person that you are working with. This element is taken away totally in the online conference world. Here it’s just what you offer and what the other person demands. It’s very easy to get lost in figures or the latest release.

When the conferences were in person you sometimes just found an artist, saw their show and hit them up, and had a good time. You got a relationship going. When you went back and saw the numbers of that artist it didn’t matter too much what they were, you rather wanted to help this person out since they were doing something you liked on stage and were a genuinely nice human being. In the digital world that chit-chat is lost and the first you look at is the YouTube or Spotify numbers and if they are low you just think I will grab it later when it rolls.

It will never roll. Things get rolling because of that meeting where the numbers don’t really matter.

Instead, I’m inundated with different online videos with concerts I will never listen to or see. I hardly see a whole concert with my favorite band Ramones. To ask me to watch a whole concert with an unknown artist that I might like is out of the question. The online conferences for artists are just like a giant playlist of nothing. So why am I’m on online conferences? Because I can talk to people I already know. Be updated on new stuff around people that I already know about their careers. Yes, I also poke around and look at new artists. Play them on my radio show. Still, I can’t feel any of the magic I could experience when we meet in person and I can help you get your whole career going.

I can just imagine this as an artist. I really feel for them. I just hope COVID goes away and we get back to at least interact with people in real-time.

The original text on Cashbox Canada

Just A Slick Production Won’t Help Today

Back in the days before the internet when the music industry sold plastic discs at high prices, you could get away with just a slick production. To produce a good album in the 70/80 and 90’s there was a different set of rules. First of all, it was very few releases. Mainly because it was expensive to get the music out. It was pressing, mastering, recording, photographs, or, and much more. In the end, an album could have the same budget as a small independent movie. Of course with that risk, you also needed to be very sure what to pick. You had to choose carefully with songs that should be on there and if they were good.

Back in the days these were called demos. A quick, dirty recording of just how the song really sounded. Mainly it showed if the song was a good song. You always knew there would be a producer that would change the sound and the final recording. I remember in the studio when I was hanging and learning about my first recording session, there was a sign on it that said “You can’t make gold out of cowshit”. Closest I guess would be “You can’t polish a turd”.

In reality, you can’t make a bad song good just with the production. A good song will be a good song more or less with what the producer will do to it. A really good song even a kind of bad producer can’t fail with it actually.The job back then was to find these songs. If you had an album full of really good songs then the choice of studio, producer, mixer, mastering, etc would be an easier job to elevate it to a top-level production. Since almost everybody had to choose good songs what you had to compete with was the production quality. Especially since most home studios couldn’t bring out that clean sound. It cost to have the best sound in the end.

Now it’s the opposite in many ways. The plugins and mics are much better. The tapes are replaced with hard drives. Getting a clean sound with the same echo as the dome in Cologne is a piece of cake. Still, people think that if you can do a perfect production you are safe. I get a lot of songs, not demos, I don’t think demos exists any longer. Today you have the same tools as the big studio on your computer. Yes, you might not be as experienced to put the sounds right as the people working in the big studios but you still can use the same tools. Also that whatever you do is not a demo it a ready song. The songs today people are so much into the production they are in fact trying to polish a turd.

Right now I got one of those in my mailbox. The artist here has been studying a couple of music production schools in the world. Not bad schools. You can hear in the production that this is really slick one. Still, the song is totally useless. Mainly because it is not a good song to start with. You can hear how the producer has put in breaks just because not because it fits. You can hear that this song has never been tested on a live audience since the breaks and configuration just makes you dizzy. The lyrics are something you think they just used this poem writing program.

You lost the feeling!

This is the main problem today. Not all people are good songwriters, but almost anybody can record stuff. You can see the same happening to TV right now through YouTube, suddenly everybody has a camera and they can do an easy TV show, even broadcast live. With that said, yes the quality of TV has been reduced. The big productions you need to pay extra for on Netflix. Still, you have over a million homemade TV programs on YouTube you can watch and also accompanied with almost equally bad shows on the free TV networks. Then sometimes a star is born and someone that has a natural talent to do shows turns up and you start watching that. Then suddenly the quality of the picture is not that important, the important stuff is how this person tells a story.

I think we have lost a lot in the music industry. Songwriting is a piece of art. Today we have schools that try to teach how to make art, in reality, it’s in you and you just have to practice over and over again. Today people jump too quick into production than actually work on the basics over and over.

The original text on Cashbox Canada

A Good Picture Says It All!

I guess many of us that work in the music industry are failed musician. My first band was not even a band. We were incredibly young and started a band even though we could not play any instruments. Instead, we played air instruments to our favorite songs. Cute yes, but there is one thing here. The first thing we did before we even rehearsed with our air instruments, was to take a band picture. To be honest to get the right location and background and pose took so long that we missed our first rehearsal and we had to get home before curfew. And the second rehearsal we looked at the pictures and the girl that sang was not pleased because the guys in the band looked better than her. In the third rehearsal, we went to take new pictures. 

I have just gone through 100 applications for my new festival, Future Echoes. I started to see a trend. Many of the pictures were blurry or out of focus. Another thing was that the artist was not in the whole picture. It was like a gallery of modern art. A place where you really don’t know what the art is, or if you are staring at the radiator and no art at all.After a while, I became really annoyed. All the pictures that were posted of the band really sucked. I was so frustrated that I promised myself to book any artist that had a real promo picture that was a good picture in the next fifty applications I checked out. Sorry to say, that I didn’t book anything. Either they were blurry or taken with a mobile camera and then added a crappy filter from Instagram. The worst ones were blurry, no lighting and with the band logo in 30% of the picture, you can’t really use that. 

It seems this is the trend of today. The artist does not have decent promo pictures. Does it matter if you book them for the music? At the same time, you also know if they don’t have the picture now, they won’t have it later and you need that picture for social media, homepage, and posters. Yes, but when you have the amount of several hundred artists the picture it can be the thing that makes your decision. That can be the thing that makes you go “wow I need to hear this!”  It happened to me a couple of years ago. Same procedure, I was going through hundreds of artists and suddenly I stopped on a guy with feathers and a big beard. The picture just talked to me. I needed to listen to this band. I did and just fell in love with the music and booked them. Here is the picture if Capitano that grabbed my attention:

Just because of that, I needed to listen to “Gypsy on a Leash” with Capitano right now. That picture just made a huge difference. And Capitano is very artsy, they do strange pictures and promo, but they are professional enough to send the really good studio pictures when presenting themselves.

 

It seems like the artists of today have forgotten what a picture can do. It is your best promo choice. Don’t get a crappy “indie” blurred picture. If you need to be artsy then do it with a big thought and also combine it with good promo pictures. My guess is that my team actually spends two working days out of five looking for promo pictures for their stories. And then they get shit from the artists when they have chosen the wrong one since the artist didn’t bother to update their homepage with a good promo picture. 

 Actually, it is very easy to stand out today in the music industry. Just have a good promo picture. And now I think back in the days past.  We didn’t know how to play any instruments, but we were professional enough to at least start with a good promo picture.

This is the turning point.

 I just felt this holiday just passed with little notice. The quarantine just made me stay at home and keep on working on my projects. The only difference was that I left social media and the mailbox with an out of office reply. Even with pandemic still raging,  it has just left me with more work than ever. The major part of the workload is also for preparing when we are getting back to seeing each other, and resuming our time on the road.

No, not going back to normal. We are not getting back to normal. Like when 9/11 happened nothing went back to normal it was a new normal. To be honest 9/11 was a small impact in comparison to something that results in a lock down for the whole world. It is a new normal we will now be facing. What we are lacking is meeting people and interaction so that will come automatically when we resume our post-pandemic roles, it’s just with what restrictions and safety precautions? This is one of the turning points in history, we will talk about before and after 2020.

Another turning point is how the new music industry will look. My guess is that many will have to change revenue models, network and opportunities. I feel sad for all the artists who have done so many online activities that probably won’t mean a thing in a couple of months. I feel for all the people that have done nothing and have sat and waited for the whole thing to blow over. Like I wrote earlier, this time has just been about preparation so we will have some sort of foundation to stand on when the new time comes.

No one can really predict what is coming around the corner. The only thing is to try to prepare as much as possible. Now that the vaccine is rolling out we must be fast and see what changes that will bring with it. My guess is that social distancing might change but how quickly? The only thing you can do is buckle up and just go-ahead for the ride.

I’m scared, part of me is scared that there will be big changes and an even bigger chance to make mistakes. On the other hand, you learn by mistakes, you just have to be fast to adapt to the new situations and try to juggle several balls and try to see what is flying and hitting the best. Most of the time changes lead to something good in the end but it’s a struggle along the way.

I got the sad news that Gerry Marsden from Gerry and the Pacemakers died a few days ago. I was supposed to secure an interview with him, but he fell ill, and it never happened. Here is an era that is at a turning point. The new music industry is not building any new stars. And the old stars are starting to leave us. The time around 2020 really is a turning point in so many ways. You will miss the old but at the same time you are so excited by the new opportunities coming your way. And you are shit scared of all the struggles that humanity has to deal with in the decades moving forward.

You just have to buckle up and welcome a new era!

The orginal story in Cashbox Magazine Canada

Consultants Are the New Management Role

 I heard from a whining artist the other day that managers only took a percentage of what the artist earned. The artist was angry since he got an offer that he could pay for management services and as usual though he became screwed.

I have seen more and more managers actually turning into more of a consultant. Even more and more of them call themselves consultants. In my opinion, that is also where the management role is going to be, and here are the reasons why.

Yes, in the old days the management role was just a percentage. At the same time, this is quite long time ago and the industry has changed. This is mainly in the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s people born in those years are now middle-aged. Back then the artist made money. Touring was a substantial part of the income. Getting a percentage of that and merch sales could make you a living, not a big a living but an income. Same with record sales. The sales came hand in hand with the release that also could be sold and get some monetary value. This was more the 70’s and 80’s, in the 90’s it started to change.

In the mid 80’s there were many managers just discovering artists then went out to the record labels shopping for a deal with a large up-front payment. Back then many labels used tax reductions to get losses deducted. Not unusual that they signed five artists in the same style and genre to put money into one, and the other four were just to kill the competition and the expression was to ‘shelve them.’ This set up worked for the manager that they just went out found a deal with a large upfront. Signed off the band took their percentage from the upfront money and then just disappeared or lost interest in the band. Went out and did the whole thing all over again, leaving so many artists stranded on labels that didn’t want to do anything for them.

This is now history. These tax reductions cannot be done. The labels now need the artist that actually is already making money. Also, they got every tool in the world to see when the artists start to make money by following numbers on streaming sites and social media. This left the manager role in 2000’s to be the developer of artists. Before you got some money now you become the investor for artists. The problem here was that the risk taken is so much bigger. In the early methods, you could easily see money after a year. Now the investment time of ROI could be as long as five years. To solve this many managers took on several bands at the same time. The risk was too big that working with an artist for three years and just when you should get some money back on your investment the artist quit. Instead, you spread the risk but did just what was needed to have them on and see where it leads to.

Over 2000’s since distribution became very easy and at no cost many artists started to manage themselves. With that, they also lost the knowledge of the manager. It was not just the money, the manager had the knowledge of how the industry worked, the manager also had the network to get things done, they did know how to ask for favours or how things needed to look before they went for something. Into the2010’s you just got more and more artists doing their self-management running around like headless chickens getting nowhere. Today,  we see many artists killing their careers with self-management. 

This of course destroyed a lot of the plans a manager could execute. That with all the risks that the manager had to do made many cross-over to other fields. The Management role became just a training course to get into a better position at a streaming service or a publisher. Then in the mid-2010’s a hybrid started to appear. Managers still needed money, the artist still needed the advice and the network. Of course, in most cases, the manager didn’t want to risk time or getting no salary for years to help an unknown artist. In many cases, they really didn’t want to get involved in that kind of way. They wanted to help but not to invest five years of non-stop free work.

Now we see this new role unfolds. Especially with the hit of Covid where the live industry went on to their knees. Under the table I see more and more managers become consultants and let an artist pay a fee for a certain time, usually a release of something. They do different things like co-ordinate the release, deals with PR, and with the distribution and shape social media and homepages up. A necessary thing for an artist to have, it’s the only way to stand out in the massive wave of music that is released every day.

Some managers think this is wrong. They get artists complaining like the guy at the beginning of this text, demanding that they should work for free and commit to working with the artist's music. They look back on history and get told that managers work for a percentage. That was true, back then the artist actually had money to share a percentage. Today 20% of zero is still zero. The artist invests in their career so they can make it a hobby until the money comes in. A manager is in a working profession and they need to have money to uphold the network and pay the bills. 

 “But please don't put your life in the hands of a rock and roll band who'll throw it all away” sang Oasis. My guess is that it’s so true. The managers that will go on the percentage will be the partners of the band, like a wife or a boyfriend. They work for free since they want to be part of the project. They are managers but I would like to have a new word for them. In reality, they are managers in training as they go along.

The professional managers will be setting up services as a consultant, that is the future. More and more are doing it and it is worth paying for their services and knowledge. We just have to teach people not to think that this world works as the world before cell phones and the internet.

Original story in Cashbox Magazine Canada

Internet Killed The Nerdiness!

 If you know me, you know I am the king of nerdiness. I was out in Stockholm and went into a second-hand store that carries used vinyl, CDs, and Comic books. No, I more or less sighed over the CDs. As a collector’s item, they really are dead. Vinyls, no I’m not a vinyl freak. I guess running a distribution service for over twenty years with vinyls I am pretty bored with the format. Still, it’s a collector's item and there were a couple of strange guys going through the boxes of different vinyls. No, I’m collecting comics, only white men in their 40:s are collecting those I guess the kids of today don’t really know what a comic book is they just think that is a merch item that went with the movie.

In front of me in the queue line was an older guy that wanted to sell some old comics. Usually, they are quite expensive. If you had a pretty good copy of Donald Duck from the 50’s it was worth money. The prices have gone down lately. The old man was unhappy with the price, so I overheard the conversation and after he left talked a bit to the owner about why the comics have gone down.

“They haven’t in one way. The problem is that Tradera (the Swedish version of E-bay) makes it so easy to put something out for sale that now a copy really has to be in mint condition to fetch the big money. Suddenly now it also should be mint condition first edition to attract the collector. The problem these sites have flooded the market and by that dumped the prices”, the guy explained.

He was totally right. His store is now selling more on Tradera, E-bay than in the store. Everything just becomes available. Part of being a collector is the hunt. You go around in small obscure shops and find a bargain. Now everything is online you just put in what you seek, and the internet will send you a message when it’s coming out. That is like playing chess and having the help of a computer. Where is the fun?

To get the whole collection you get it extremely easy online, you just wait for the notes from the sites to come in. Or you must have a lot of money to buy exceedingly rare items for a lot of cash. Also, you lost the driving force to get out there to hunt down that item that you were looking for. You don’t need to know the history of an object and where to find it. You just buy it.

I drew parallels with the music industry. A lot of my bands I liked as a kid were impossible to buy in my hometown. First of all, the records stores in my hometown Örebro really sucked! It was like old dudes digging country and thought they really understood music. They thought they were cool when they brought in bands that were hot ten years after their peak. Calling these stores record stores is like calling McDonalds fine dining. So, I was going to Stockholm the capital of special fairs to hunt down strange copies of Ramones, Mistfits records, and memorabilia. That happened two times a year and it was like Christmas two times extra a year. These times were a hunt and a coolness to find something new. Also, you find some new stuff.

Today you find these rare collection items more than the big hits online. Since they are rare, people shared these first, so they are really out there. The Internet gave us all and also killed the nerdiness of collections. Now it is only mint conditions that are of value. Not to be heard just to collect for a lot of money. Like an investment.

My hunt for the next thing is almost dead. I still go to car boot sales and find stuff. Just because they are not online you can still hunt cool things down. Also, find stuff that you never have seen; you learn something. Online you just type in exactly what you know and then you just have that.

So where is the nerdiness that I need? It used to be in the live scene. Seeing new artists on small stages. That was a driving force. Then Covid hit and took that away. So, I could find a new artist online. No, you really can’t; it’s the same stupid things as collecting things online. There is no hunt, there is no excitement. It is killing the game. I am just waiting for Covid to go away and I can get back out hunting for new cool music. My guess also that it will explode with new music. But I will get back to that in another of my stories.

Luckily, I can nerd down in other things. I just pumped my aquarium. And here the internet is great to find new things since you are not a collector you just need practical solutions. So, I can still be a nerd, but the internet is a double-edged sword in the battle.

Orginal story in Cashbox Magazine Canada

Which Artists Will Survive COVID-19?

 I have been talking to many festival organizers over the past weeks. Mainly I wanted to ask if they are going to try to do them in the summer of 2021 or push them to 2022 or just close altogether. That has been the debate the whole time which bars, gig venues, and festivals will survive. The other discussion is which artists will survive has not been covered much in the media but has been discussed behind the scenes activity in the industry.

Many festivals are taking the same line-up with them from 2020 until 2021. Now of course if they move to 2022, that line-up is not that current. Even if you have the line-up from last year who knows which artists will still be active.

Ok, huge artists who have a stack of money will survive. But the middle size bands that you think are making money are at risk. Now when money is low, they are forced to find other jobs with probably better payment. When things clear up in a bit there is a big chance that they have found new career paths and don’t feel stable enough to get back to the uncertain music industry again. Many of these people will be light engineers, sound engineers, and back musicians. Without those, the artist can’t tour. Of course, they can get new ones, but they need to be trained.

Another problem might be that the artist that should have been on the road in 2020 might not be able to do it in 2021. The festivals really don’t know who they can have on their line-ups. The latest gossip is that the really big festivals that need artists from all around the globe will push to 2022 since they are not sure if people will be able or allowed to fly this summer.

My guess is that many artists will abandon their careers. They have felt it’s not fun anymore and this will be the final nail in the coffin. Music is not dying though. The empty slots are replaced by new ones. We need music and there are people that also express themselves through it. I guess we will see a big change in many charts though. A massive thing with a new artist coming up.

Then you have the backside that you always get in these situations with the economy going down and people laid off. Suddenly all these that jumped on a new career years ago in another crisis are picking up their instrument again and trying to make a comeback. Right now, my email box is full of band members from the past doing new projects. The problem with them is that you know already they don’t have the stamina to be in this business, so my attention span for them is very low.

I’m on the hunt for new artists that want to take a chance, really live and breathe music, and want to explore the new opportunities that will be available in the new world after the pandemic.

In these situations, you can see who really wants to be in the industry and likes to work with music. Not just saying that they do, the people that mean it. I can also say that I see the same patterns along with people that tried to get into the business but really never had the full passion. With these positions taken again, you will have new opportunities. The issue right now is to forecast who will stay on and who will fall off the train.

The original column from Cashbox Magazine

Fans or Just Numbers?

You know what? Your song might not be a flop just because it doesn’t have any numbers. The numbers just show how much marketing that has been done. The numbers don’t tell you if the song is good or bad. The numbers just tell you how many that listened to it and that doesn’t even tell how long they spent of their time listening to the song.

We have a problem in the music industry because too many people believe that they can find the next thing strictly by the numbers. Not statistics, you can actually get info from statistics. Only information on things that are not the future (yet). I have seen new programs that can predict a little bit of how songs will perform in the future from the statistics, but just if nothing major happens.

The problem is the number crunching. People just go on Spotify and see that “wow! This has 12 million listings!” and automatically think it is a hit. To be honest you can easily get those numbers with a crappy song and put it into the right channels to get the numbers up. The problem is that the fans are not actual fans, they are just people getting shot in a drive-by music shooting in the different digital outlets. A victim of how someone managed to fool the algorithm to place the song in front of you and you click on it just to listen the first 20 seconds and realize that it is so bad you just want to turn it off. Switch the channel to something else and forget about the song. The problem is that mistake is now a figure in the listing’s statistics for that song. Another way to lure the algorithms is to share it with another victim of bad music.

So now you think I will tell you that it was better before. Not really, this has been this way for too many years. Before this was done by blowing up your sales in cheating ways. An artist in Sweden for example sold his new single for one cent in the ice cream trucks. Then reported the sales.  One way to cheat the algorithms. At the same time Virgin used housewives in the 70’s and the 80’s. Gave them money to go down to buy the records they wanted in the charts. The phenomena is not new in any way. The problem here is that now it’s so easy and cheap that any average Joe can do it online because now suddenly it’s easier to cheat the numbers than actually have a real career.

The truth then was exposed when the artist went on tour. Suddenly even the most streamed artist in the world could only get 500 people to a show in a major city. A good marker was if an artist could draw an audience on a live show if they really had any fans or just numbers. Now during COVID this function is off. There are no measurements at all. There are no live shows and no real audiences. This has never happened before and the reactions I see right now are very strange. Okay a lot more PR is done for each new release. The cheating is now through the roof. At the same time, nothing new comes out from all the noise. No new artists are on the horizon. It’s mainly the old that we already had and are trusted that get any attention. If anything the noise is so loud so even that AC/DC has released a new single which people never thought would happen since members have died and so on. Still, the noise was so loud that they were drowned. It passed me I found out by mistake that there was a new single out.

I was recently checking the numbers. The song has been out for less than a month and has just passed 6 million streams. That is what an average Joe rapper from Hackensack can cheat up to in a week. Okay and the song will climb on if it gets traction. But my guess is that if they manage to tour again the song will reach quite high numbers. Like I wrote at the beginning of this article, it’s all about marketing, the problem right now is that the number one tool is shut down (live performances) and we don’t know for how long or when it things will be able to return to some sort of normal.

One thing I will be thrilled to see is what happens when COVID is over and how will live appearances change the top lists.

Here is the original article from Cashbox Canada

The Biggest Destroyer Of Careers Are Artists Themselves!

It just comes in waves. Suddenly you have a couple of artists just destroying their careers. The methods are quite varied and there is not a shortage of intriguing ways that they do it. The funny thing is these mistakes are always blamed on the industry itself. Also many times the artist totally ignores advice and does things anyways, blames the industry, and then just does exactly as the advice says and then acts like they invented sliced bread. I guess my list could be be very long. I just will take the ones that happened in the past two weeks have been discussed in different managers forums around the internet.

I want to be special and change my artist name!
This happens from time to time. When things are going slow then suddenly the artist wants to change the name. Like rebranding everything from scratch. That is a good way to just put years of work just into the trash. Also, they usually also want to use strange things in spelling. Like a band I had years ago they spelled Ness and should promptly have a Ñess. Yes, you guessed it. A search of this is impossible. And that doesn’t really help anything for the whole situation. So, on some sites, they are Ness and some Ñess. Some search engines won’t understand if you search with the right spelling. A good way to destroy your career is doing shit like this to make it harder for people to find your music. Stay even away from small apostrophes that can mess things up. I saw three cases of this week, just saying.

Being rude and messing with the staff!
Just because you haven’t got your statement, you don’t email everyone on the record label threatening to go to court if you don’t get your statement right now. On top of that, you start to mess with all the people you have befriended on the label on Facebook when you didn’t get an answer in the first thirty minutes, even people that have nothing to do with accounting. I don’t know if we have more narcissistic people thinking that the universe is revolving around them? And this artist then thinks everything is alright when they get what they asked for. No instead, they just put themselves on the bottom list of people you want to help. Sure, you should get your statement, but an error can happen and give people at least some time to answer things. Especially now when people are working at home and might not be able to access everything right then. I had four cases this week of artists that begged for services from me that has acted this way and of course, I’m not interested to give them anything. In one case I even said no to big money just because I didn’t want to have anything with that a-hole again.

Blame the organizer for your own faults!
It seems the world is full of small Donald Trumps. The worst thing you can do is blame the organizers. Okay, they can do errors but if they try to fix that. Still, most of the errors are on yourself. Most of the times these people gave you a chance, an opportunity, it’s not right to blame them when you couldn’t handle what they gave them. I have seen too many artists getting airplay and just ignore it, at least four times this week. Artists talking shit that their career didn’t explode on a certain event and because of that, the event is shit, two times this week. In both cases, the artist actually didn’t do anything about the event. They just got there played. Did no networking. Was rude to the staff and got drunk. Suddenly that is the organizer's fault that nothing happened. You can be sure though that these things are talked about in the inner circles. I had at least five warnings about artists that act this way just this week.

My career is going to be better if I change my manager!
Oh, boy, don’t get me started on this one. Bands that just get a manager and expect them to fix everything and do nothing. Now during the pandemic, I see so many artists that suddenly should change the manager since they are not doing enough. Like they could, seems like the artist forgot that there is a pandemic going on and the COVID-19 situation is also affecting managers. So for not having much action at all right now, they have to start to post things and get some jobs done. Then they think they are working hard and why do you need a manager then? Instead of doing things to further their career, they spend their time hunting for a new manager. In the end, they are just jumping networks or became dropped. Then they try to use the old connections that the manager introduced them to in the first place.

The list can probably go on and on, but these just happened in one way or another I might get back on this in the future.

There are too many artists that lose their careers on simple mistakes and the industry is not forgiving of those things.

This blog was originally posted on Cashbox Magazine Canada

Do You Think It’s The Right Timing For It?

If I only got a cent for each time I get that question I would have bought a nice flat in the center of London, maybe next to the Queen. No, it’s never the right time or the perfect setting for doing anything. Life would be very easy if it was that way.

I have met so many artists that just sit and wait for the right opportunity and the right place and time/ I have never seen any of these artists succeed or make a career either. I guess your worst enemy is that you think you should do everything in the right order in the right place and suddenly everything will be fine and you will be a superstar.

No, those moments don’t really exist. Hey, you say you read about them in a book about some artists the other week or in a blog post. Yes, there is a right place and time, but they never happen by chance. These moments will happen in a successful artist’s career and you will remember them later. The problem is that you never speak about all the other mistakes you did along the way, you just talk about that moment in interviews and books not what led up to that moment.

When asked if it’s the right time or the right thing to do I just answer – how long is a string. I can only say that if you get an opportunity and not jump on it for most parts it will be a mistake. Yes, it will be safer not knowing and sitting home and wait for the perfect opportunity. After a while though saying no to everything less and fewer opportunities will come by. In the end, you might be so afraid to take the chance that you even say no just for safety waiting for the perfect opportunity.

Right now you can read my column in Cashbox Magazine Canada and Record World. I can easily say when the opportunity arose that I could write for them. I can remember the day when suddenly Sandy Graham, Editor in Chief said that my text was so important that she would like to feature my blogs in the magazine.

Yes, I could easily have said no. Hey I don’t have English as my native language. I might never be as good as anyone that has English as their first language. At the time I was also in a big project where I also did a lot of editing for films, so it was not that I had a lot of time on my hands. No, the offer was not in the right time for the opportunity. Here though I did a choice. Just go for it. What can happen? Someone complains that my language is not colorful enough? Does it matter if I have a thing that is important to say? Sandy thought my text was important enough. No just go for it. And now you are reading this text a couple of years later and the readership numbers are high.

And out of that the opportunity it has led to so many other opportunities that would never have happened if I just had said no. Now I can say that it was the perfect opportunity because I have the bigger story. But that was created later but taking the first jump at the opportunity.

So why do I write this? Mainly because I just made another decision. An opportunity that I want to follow. And no, it’s definitely not a perfect opportunity, it’s just that I think I have my career because I would rather say yes than no to new things.

So, what was the decision? Oh that is that my posts now will move from my personal blog to Cashbox and Record World Magazine. You can now on follow me there and the post in my blog is just mirrors of what is going on there. The opportunity is to promote that more.

So is it ever the right timing for it? That is up to you to find out – but learn to say yes instead of no – you never know where these opportunities will lead you.

Here is the original Cashbox Canada article

No stats without action!

Last story I wrote was about numbers. I said there that numbers are different than statistics. I have a problem also with statistics in one way. You can get things out of statistics so don’t discard them, use all the tools to collect whatever facts are out there. Still have one thing in your mind. Statistics are only available on action taken.

There won’t be any statistics if you don’t do anything. More or less no action, zero statistics. Or even just a small bit of action the data that comes in will be too little to draw any conclusions. And of course, if you cheat then your data will be not correct either.

I think many people today are not using the data that is actually out there. You should monitor a release and see what is getting any tractions. Most of the time I mainly see artists just count interviews or anything where they can pose and be a star counting. They never check if that interview is read or even lead to some new people getting to the music. That is so easy today, but yes vanity and ego is still big in many ways.

Another thing is that the artists are too fast to quit the marketing,  giving up before reaching something. It seems they are mainly releasing a song just to be able to make a Facebook and Instagram post about it.

Then we have the big thing around statistics. Statistics can never say if a song is a hit or not beforehand. Since it’s only monitoring things in the past it has a very hard time predicting what is going on. If I have a song that is one year old and only has a couple of thousand streams the statistics will be quite boring. If I know though that my song will be used in the next blockbuster movie in the USA as the lead theme next summer I know it will be exposed to millions of people.

Here the statistics would tell us that this song is useless but with my other information the song is glowing hot and many people would jump on that train. This is why statistics really can’t predict that much of the future - just the past. In reality, a song might just be a hit if millions of people would have a chance to hear it. Possibly also not be a hit if millions of people hear it. Of course, the exposure makes a possibility for people to discover the song and like it. If the song is bland and not that attractive there still will be people attracted to the song but not so many would be picked up by the exposure.

Here the statistics can come in handy. Even if you get exposure to millions of people, how do you keep those that really liked your music? You can see in the statistics where they came from and you can try to get them to follow your channels.

The problem I have today is that people are talking like statistics can predict a future. Even with my music in that movie that is nothing certain. The movie itself might flop then fewer people will listen to it. The song is placed in a way that it’s just in the background and not that prominent. Nothing is certain until it has happened. The only thing you can rely on is that you need to do quite many things and sign up to get your data to be able to get something out of it. At the same time doing a lot of things with your music is the only way for many people to listen to it. It’s in the actions, not the statistics.

The original story on Cashbox Canada

The social dilemma, artists stop using social media!

A new documentary that people should see about how social media is disrupting even democracy. And I just take that message that the Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff says in the movie “Social media should be forbidden”. Is it anything right now that is killing the music, it’s social media! I have been wondering why I don’t get new songs? Okay, I’m over 35 and that means that your musical taste is set. I’m working in the industry, so I’m used to getting new music to me since it’s part of my business. So if I can't find new music how can a normal fan get it? Before I always found new music. Since the lockdown on Covid I realized that all these new good music came from outside. Everything I discovered was through showcase festivals where people had curated line-up’s where I could go around like a smorgasbord and just discover new things. On top of that a lot of great people that create new things and work really hard that could tip me off on great new artists and music they had found for me to just access.

During Covid I almost found nothing. Yes, I have been on several online events of showcase festivals. Many great done and you could see some new artists. The problem is that you are in front of a screen where messages pop up every second minute. The algorithms don’t like that I stay on the same spot for a longer period of time. Then it reacts by giving me the advice to see something new. Suddenly I see messages that somebody totally unknown posted a video on Tiktok. Why give me that advice? I don’t even use Tiktok in that way, it’s like Twitter – who cares about 60-sec video? Only people with attention problems same as Twitter, mainly for people that can only write a sentence and has a mind of a goldfish.

So why didn’t the system sends it to me? I didn’t want me to be bored seeing a live concert online. To be totally honest, the great events put together by great people were totally destroyed by social media.

It’s not just all that. I also miss all the chit chat you do with people that like music and comes with really great tip-offs of new things. I haven’t had a conversation like that since March and now it starts to take its toll. I REALLY DON’T FIND ANY GOOD MUSIC!

The algorithms can’t predict what my feelings are unless I don’t start to click on suicide links. So they can’t guess what I’m up for. If I spend yesterday just listening to Queen I don’t need another link to Queen music. I did that because I did a special show around them. It was work. Now the algorithms are bombarding me with Queen music or bad copies of Queen music. Not a good way to discover new music.

Also, the algorithms are best at giving me crappy music as well. Right now, we just handed over the keys to new discoveries to anyone that likes to cheat. So that dude that really is mediocre but has some money now can easily just cheat it’s way up with his music into a lot of places. This creates something I warned about already fifteen years ago. The brown wave! A wave of just not thought through mediocre music. On top of that, you have the platforms with music nagging on to the artist that they should release music at a faster pace. Soon musicians are releasing a song as a Facebook post.

That can never be any quality! Even Lenorado Da Vinci who was a genius couldn't paint a new Mona Lisa each week. Sure, he could do a decent drawing each week, but never a masterpiece. Why on hell do the platforms think that an artist today should be able to perform that? Even worse now since the artist also becomes interrupted by stupid messages that pop up when the algorithm thinks that the artist is bored but instead tries to find inspiration! That would be like having some ugly little orc sitting next to Leonardo Da Vinci and poke him in the arm while trying to paint Mona Lisa.

So here is the problem. You musicians out there. STOP using social media the way you do it now. The only thing you are going to be is an influencer that also can do mediocre songs from time to time. You will not be a musician; you will be an influencer. Unfortunately, an influencer is just a person doing content for a big machine, not art, just cheap fast content. The art we do right now is like calling Mc Donald's fine dining.

What is happening to me right now is that I’m fed with music that I already know and like and discovers nothing. I know there is plenty of great things out there that I should and need to hear, but everything is blocked by evil algorithms that just wait for people to pay them to show who pays the most. Okay if I paid and got to choose between the crap and the good. No, they just give me something and think that is alright. We don't need new outlets like Deezer or Spotify, Youtube, Tiktok. We badly need an outlet that shows us good music. Not having quantity instead of quality. Can someone please build that?

Now someone just say stop complaining and do something. I did! I started Cashbox radio where the algorithm can’t influence. The problem is that I’m robbed of my outlet to find new good music for the station because of a virus. I’m just waiting though, soon this channel will be open again, and hopefully, we can provide people with good music again.

I asked around and many people felt the same as me. No good music has coming theri way for along time.  My suggestion is kind of selfish, stop hanging on social media, go to Cashbox radio and we will present you with some new music among with music that you like and know. Finding tracks you have forgotten. Cashbox has the slogan: Radio as it used to be. We should have A way of escaping a bad algorithm choice. Use the app and then put your phone away so you can hear it not see the screen where the evil orcs are trying to get you to change to something new. That is my contribution to the situation. 

As soon as Covid is over, we just going to get more and more things rolling. And I will work more and more to get music out from the static social media.

Do you think it’s the right timing for it?

 Do you think it’s the right timing for it?

If I only got a cent for each time, I get that question I would have bought a nice flat in the center of London, maybe next to the Queen. No, it’s never the right time or the perfect setting for doing anything. Life would be very easy if it was that way.

I have meet many artists that just sit and wait for the right opportunity on the right place. I have never seen any of these artists succeed or make a career either. I guess your worst enemy is that you think you should do everything in the right order in the right place and suddenly everything will be fine and you will be a superstar.

No, those moments don’t really exist. Hey, you say you read about them in a book about some artists the other week or in a blog post. Yes, there is a right place and time, but they never happen by chance. These moments will happen in a successful artist career and you will remember them later. The problem is that you never speak about all the other mistakes you did along the way you just talk about that moment in interviews and books not what lead up to that moment.

When asked if it’s the right time or the right thing to do I just answer – how long is a string. I can only say that if you get an opportunity and not jump on it for most parts it will be a mistake. Yes, it will be safer not knowing and sitting home and wait for the perfect opportunity. After a while though saying no to everything less and fewer opportunities will come by. In the end, you might be so afraid to take the chance that you even say no just for safety to the perfect opportunity.

Right now you read my column in Cashbox Magazine Canada and Record World. I can easily say when the opportunity arose that I could write for them. I can really the day when suddenly Sandy the chief editor said that my text was so important that she would like to feature them in the magazine.

Yes, I could easily say no. Hey I don’t have English as my native language. I’m might never be as good as anyone that has English as their first language. At the time I was also in a big project where I also did a lot of editing for films, so it was not that I had a lot of time on my hands. No, the offer was not in the right opportunity. Here though I did a choice. Just go for it. What can happen? Someone complains that my language is not colorful enough? Does it matter if I have a thing that is important to say? Sandy thought my text was important enough. No just go for it. And now you are reading this text a couple of years later.

And out of that the opportunity it has led to so many other opportunities that would never have happened if I just had said no. Now I can say that it was the perfect opportunity because I have the story. But It wasn’t that is created later.

So why do I write this, mainly because I just took another decision. An opportunity that I want to follow. And no, it’s definitely not a perfect opportunity, it’s just that I think I have my career because I rather say yes than no to new things.

So, what was the decision. Oh, that is that my posts now will move from my personal blog to Cashbox and Record World Magazine. You will now on follow me there and the post in my blog is just mirrors of what is going on there. The opportunity is to promote that more.

I need some action.

 Last post I wrote was about numbers. I said there that numbers are different than statistics. I have a problem also with statistics in one way. You can get things out of statistics so don’t discard them use all the tools to collect whatever fact that is out there. Still have one thing in your mind.

Statistics are only available on action taken. There won’t be any statistics if you don’t do anything. More or less no action, zero statistics. Or even just a small bit of action the data that comes in will be too little to draw any conclusions. And of course, if you cheat your data will be not correct either.

I think many today are not using the data that is actually out there. You should monitor a release and see what is getting any tractions Most of the time I mainly see artists just count interviews or anything where they can pose and be a star counting. They newer check if that interview is read or even lead to some new people getting to the music. That is so easy today, but yes vain is still big in many ways.

Another thing is that the artists are too fast to quit the marketing giving up reaching something. It seems they are mainly releasing a song just to be able to make a Facebook and Instagram post about it.

Then we have the big thing around statistics. Statistics can never say if a song is a hit or not beforehand. Since it’s only monitoring things in the past it has a very hard time predicting what is going on. If I have a song that is one year old and only has a couple of thousand streams the statistics will be quite boring. If I know though that my song will be used in the next blockbuster movie in the USA as the lead theme next summer I know it will be exposed to millions of people.

Here the statistics would tell us that this song is useless but with my other information the song is glowing hot and many people would jump on that train. This is why statistics really can’t predict that much of the future just the past. In reality, a song might just be a hit if millions of people would have a chance to hear it. Possibly also not be a hit if millions of people hear it. Of course, the exposure makes a possibility for people to discover the song and liked it. If the song is bland and not that attractive there still will be people attracted to the song but not so many would be picked up by the exposure.

Here the statistics could come in handy. Even if you get exposure to millions of people. How do you keep those that really liked your music? You can see in the statistics where they came from and you can try to get them to follow your channels.

The problem I have today is that people are talking like statistics can predict a future. Even with my music in that movie that is nothing certain. The movie itself might flop then fewer people will listen to it. The song is placed in a way that it’s just in the background and not that prominent. Nothing is certain until it has happened. The only thing you can rely on is that you need to do quite many things and sign up to get your data to be able to get something out of it. At the same time doing a lot of things with your music is the only way for many people to listen to it. It’s in the actions, not the statistics.

Fans or just numbers?

 You know what, your song might not be a flop just because it doesn’t have any numbers. The numbers just show how much marketing that has been done. The numbers don’t tell you if the song is good or bad. The numbers just tell you how many people that started it, don’t even tell how long they spent the time to listen to the song.

We have a problem in the music industry because too many people believe that they can find the next thing by numbers. Not statistics, you can actually get info from statistics. Only information on things that have been not the future, yet. I have seen new programs that can predict a bit of how songs will perform in the future from the statistics, but just if nothing major happens.

The problem is the number crunching. People just go in on Spotify and see that wow this has 12 million listings and automatically think it is a hit. To be honest you can easily get those numbers with a crappy song and put it in the right channels to get the numbers. The problem is that the fans are not fans they are just people getting shot in a drive-by music shooting in the different digital outlets. A victim of that someone managed to fool the algorithm to place the song in front of you and you click on it just to listen the first 20 seconds and realize this is so bad I just want o turn it off. Switch the channel to something else and forget about the song. The problem is that mistake is now a figure in the listing’s statistics for that song. Another way to lure the algorithms to show it to another victim of bad music.

So now you think I will tell you that it was better before. Not really this has been this way too many years. Before this was done by blowing up your sales in cheating ways. An artist in Sweden for example sold his new single for one cent in the ice cream trucks. Then reported the sales. One way to cheat the algorithms. At the same time Virgin used housewives in the 70: s and the 80: s. Gave them money to go down to buy the records they wanted in the charts. The phenomena are not new in any way. The problem here is that now it’s so easy and cheap that every average joe can do it online suddenly it’s easier to cheat than actually having a real career.

The thing usually then was exposed when the artist went on tour. Suddenly even the most streamed artist in the world could only get 500 people to a show in a major city. A good marker was if an artist could draw an audience on a live show if they really had any fans or just numbers. Now during Covid this function is off. There are no measurements at all. There are no live shows and no real audience. This has never happened before and the reactions I see right now is very strange. Okey a lot more PR is done for each release. The cheating is mainly through the roof. At the same time, nothing new comes out from the noise. No new artists are on the horizon. It’s mainly the old that we already had and are trusted that gets any attention. If any the noise is so loud so even that AC/DC gave out a new single witch people never thought it would since members have died and so on. Still, the noise was so loud that they were drowned. It passed me I found out by mistake that there was a new single out.

I just looked at the numbers. The song has been out in a month and has just passed 6 million streams. That is what an average joe rapper from Hackensack can cheat up to in a week. Okey the song will climb on if it gets traction. But my guess is that if they manage to tour again the song will reach quite much. Like I wrote in the beginning it’s all about marketing, the problem right now is that the number one tool is shut down and we don’t know for how long.

One thing I will be thrilled to see is what happens when Covid is over and how will the live change the top lists.

Mind the gap!

 So, it happens again. It is funny how I see this happening from time to time with cycles. This time I’m a bit concerned since it’s worse than before.

I’m talking about the gap between amateur artists and the professional industry. Time to time the knowledge and the information seem to just be for a couple of few people at the really top of the industry. Usually, also information is critical for an artist's career. I remember the last time I really saw this was when Spotify started to hit off in 2009. All info pointed out that we where going into streaming. The artist was still on the level of printing CD:s and barely understood download.

Oh I also need to clarify that when I talk amateur that contains quite many people that runs smaller independent labels, and a lot of people that just work locally in one country.

I remember also the shit you had to take when you explained to all these people that what they were doing was yesterday's news. They were laughing at me and made fun when you spoke on panels. Of course the same people then after being out of the loop then adapted and came closer to the reality and after five years they stopped laughing at panels about what you were speaking about.

The tragic part here is that is the time where we started to develop the new stuff. So what was new for them was starting to be kind of old to us.

Right now, I feel that is happening again. I looked into the situation and I guess it has to do with several things. Most of the time it's triggered by a crisis. Yes, if you remember there was an economic crisis around the time Spotify came around. These crises tend to make people getting laid off and change their normal behavior. Suddenly they can do arts again and suddenly we have doubled the people that want to have a career in music. Of course, the opportunities are usually less when the crises hit so the timing is not that perfect.

Now we have the COVID and suddenly you have all these people that want or need to change their career. The problem is that the industry has just begun a new journey that we are looking for. At the same time there people were in the industry like six years ago. All this just gets me artists that think that they can get a career on Spotify streams. That really doesn’t understand how social media is working in the new world.

What I see this time it’s going deeper? I can see the local record labels are in the same low knowledge as the artists. Even a lot of the people on the bigger labels have been switch out and have really not the knowledge left. And this is a basic knowledge of how contracts, rights, and other things work so it’s not really any strange things. It’s things you need to know to be able to work or continue working in this business.

Of course for the people that are designing the new industry, this is a golden opportunity. My worries are that we will lose quite much of the business because people are going nowhere and in the end, they just will quit and end up in a fast-food joint somewhere. The whole place also crawls with prophets that really has no knowledge whatsoever. For an artist, it’s really hard to separate who is who. I just hope that the gap isn’t growing bigger. If so then we won’t have any platforms to grow new artists that can make a career fast enough.