I couldn’t go without saying a few words of support for Created In Birmingham, who did a brief post a few months ago on Surface Unsigned a while back. CiB did a bit more digging and to keep a long story short, and it seems that in order to progress through the competition you need to sell tickets to at least 25 of your fans (friends) at £6 a pop, and in return you get a few guitar strings and the vague promise of peck on the cheek from the music industry.

To back this up, they put up some of the terms so that people could read about how the competition works - which Surface Unsigned weren’t that happy with, and asked CiB to take down the post with a strongly worded letter threatening legal action.

You can follow all this (and get the story much more better-ly explained) on Pete Ashton’s post about Surface Unsigned. The best thing is the re-write of the Surface Unsigned terms and conditions in Lolspeak.

My big thing is that you don’t need battle of the band events (which frequently descend into how-many-cows-have-you-got-yeah-Ive-got-104-friends wrongness) to enjoy music, or even to “make it” if that’s your aim. If you’re not playing with bands that you like, or releasing records, then the best advice I could give to anyone is to give it a go yourself.

It’s never easy, but it’s you trying to make a difference - and if we all did that then I’m fairly certain that events where 25 of your friends are charged £6 to see you play a 20 minute set wouldn’t exist.

Ok, I’ll kick off by telling you a brief history of time as I understand it. If cartoons have taught me anything, it’s that music started in the olden days when cavemen hit the amazingly-in-tune-ribs of dinosaur skeletons for the general amusement of their tribes, and to pass the time in between sleeping and eating and inventing fire. Everyone enjoyed a good old wail and music was born.

Later came the days of sophistication, and instruments which didn’t use rib cages were invented along with proper songs that people wanted to hear. The ‘best’ musicians could also get their music heard by more people than their local village, as there was a distribution system – roads! Troubadours would go from town to town singing their songs to whoever would pay them money – as Troubadours have to eat – but you could also make a pretty penny from the landed gentry.

Skip forward loads more and you start to get the first instances of recording music, and playing it back. The technology evolved and music became a lot more accessible, but there were overheads of printing pressing and marketing. I can’t imagine the logistics of being one of the early companies selling 78s as production costs would have been massively high and relatively few people could play it back! Headache.

Skip forward again to the late 70’s and early 80s (I did tell you it would be brief AND I’ve missed the bit that goes on about The Beatles) and technology gets cheaper still. Some vital things happened to music here. Firstly, it becomes cheaper and feasible for anyone to press up a load of vinyl and start a record label – Spiral Scratch is a great example of how the process of starting a record label was massively demystified and secondly, a bigger use of fanzines allowed music fans to talk to each other without having to go through the established media.

Ok, well this deliberately selective history brings us up to now. The starting up cost for a record label is as low as it’s ever been since the invention of CD Burners! More and more I find myself getting EPs from bands on CD-Rs at gigs.

But it goes further than that; we’re starting to see the CD-R label becoming a part of the landscape and I genuinely hope that this is the latest iteration of the burning DIY ethos. Some examples for you –

Cloudberry Records. A wonderful label based in Miami which specialises in jangly indiepop on 3” CD-Rs, the releases are limited to 100 and I daresay they send them to the four corners of the world. Popkids of the World Unite! The ethos is on the front page – Cloudberry believes in; unrequited love, systems of resistance, sense of community, DIY ethics and international socialism. You can get loads of free MP3s from their site too.

Asaurus Records. They say it’s alright to refer to them as the Wal-Mart of CD-R labels, and they have put out a large number of amazing bands. It’s run by musicians for musicians.

WeePOP Records. Back to the world of 3” CD-Rs, these come lovingly hand made and assembled in lovely brown paper bags. Look at their latest news and the pop-up sleeve and tell me that it isn’t something special.

And that’s just it, they’re something special. I’d rather have a CD-R in a lovingly hand made cover (the same care should be taken over the packaging as it is the music, unless you want your CD to look like everyone elses) than another proper CD with a printed top in a jewell case which is at least three times more expensive. I’ve used this blog to rave on to you about the fold-out-pirate-map Jesmond Villas CD-R cover, and the WeePOP-UP CD-R above is a good example too. I also got a lovely Wave Machines CD-R recently where the CD-R fits perfectly flush into a 5” circle cut in some cardboard. There are loads of ways to make your CD-Rs special.

There’s loads more examples well outside of indiepop too. I was browsing through the racks at Mono a few months ago to see that some noise bands in Glasgow such as Kylie Minoise are using CD-Rs too. Even Radiohead are doing it.

So there you go. Music has brought us here, to a place where you can ‘manufacture’ CD-Rs, hand-make-them-lovely, and pop them up on a website where it can be seen by everyone with internet access, and post them off to people round the world. You can build a community by starting a CD-R label of your band, and putting out stuff by bands you like too, who share an ethos or a sound. It’s now easier and cheaper to own a label now than it ever has been before in the history of music. Get one.

Here’s 100 CD-Rs. Now Start a Record Label.

Whilst looking through the Gigbeth Collective Memory, I came across a set of notes from the Gigbeth Conference on David Nikel’s excellent blog.

One thing that really leapt out of me was the following quote,

“I had to stick up for promoters in one session where it seemed we got the blame for falling attendances at live performances! Firstly I’m not sure attendances are falling. There are more gigs now than ever before and in my experience this has been demand-led. Promoters were also criticised for not paying bands. I would love to pay every band that plays for me, but it’s just not feasible. I tend to pay a headline band the going rate and then support slots are offered to local bands looking to make a name for themselves. The important point here is those local bands are quite willing to play for free.”

I sincerely hope that blaming promoters for a perceived fall in gig attendences isn’t a common view in the ‘music industry’.

As David rightly points out - I’m not sure that overall attendances are dropping off. The question is of course where this statistic comes from, and as I’ve not seen a bespectacled man in a pinstriped suit, bowler hat, and clipboard at the door of every gig ticking off boxes as people go in, I guess it’s short hand terminology for “attendances at gigs we know we make money out of are dropping”.

On the second point, most promoters I know seem to run at a loss, or only cover their costs (in our case, every penny taken at the door goes directly to the bands, and we hope and pray that bar takings cover the room hire). This is why promoters - who are caught in a difficult balance of covering costs and keeping the door as cheap as possible - can’t always pay bands as much as they would like.

If there are policy makers in the music industry who are unhappy about this then surely some emphasis should be on the redistribution of money from the bits of the music industry which run at a profit (actually, is there a bit of the music industry which runs at a profit at the moment?) down to ‘grassroots level’ where it could be used to allow local promoters to pay bands more and take more risks. For example, Chicks Dig Jerks were thinking about calling it a day earlier this year due to the financial risks involved with promoting locally, and that would have surely been a blow to many bands looking to play in Birmingham and the people who attend as well as the diversity of the local music scene.

I know this idealistic financial support for local music (at the source, as it were) would never happen - who would get the money as “good music” is such a subjective phrase, would the money be no strings attached, which company would ever pay it, how much would it be, how would you apply, what would the criterion be for funding, which promoters *actually* want the stinking money, can a promoter take it and be independent in spirit, can anyone be arsed to fill out yet another form, etc ad infinitum - but the fact that promoters are getting stick at an industry conference makes me worry that somewhere further up the music tree, people are forgetting the hard work and money that promoters put in on a local level, often voluntarily, and often because they love music and not because music generates wealth.

If something is going wrong then the emphasis should be on supporting promoters rather than finger pointing.