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01.02.13 MusicWeek 27
make our stuff even better cheaply rather than needing a massive studio and it would sound like a mix you would do 15 years ago that would cost ten times as much money. It’s gone up proportionately; the technology has gone up to make it polished and make us better. Lewis: I love that approach and I think the reason we work with young people more often is because I find what they bring to the table that much more exciting to an extent. Also, there’s a misunderstanding amongst younger people of exactly what the role of a producer is. For us it can be anything from writing and producing so you’re doing everything from scratch, to the more traditional sense of when you could literally just be the third voice - where Quincy Jones might walk into a room and say “change the flute” and that’s it, but that one thing makes that record. Fifteen years of making music has given us a level of experience to know sometimes when to do nothing and when to do a lot. I think actually that’s the real art of producing; not the buttons and the technology, really just knowing how to make records.
Do you worry there will come a point where the polish you put on records won’t be appreciated anymore? Babalola:Not really. Things are always going to be changing; technology drives music and music drives technology, each move with the times. There’s no point worrying about what’s going to happen in the future. It’s not like it was in the Eighties but we weren’t making music then, so it’s only the old producers that tell us “we don’t get to fly in private jets anymore”. Lewis:We’re also seeing a lot of younger people involved in the business side. They’re really smart and understand how this kind of industry is going to work in a few years. I think actually it’s probably the older generation in the industry that put a grey cloud over it. The reality is, it will be fine - it’s just how exactly is yet to be determined.
ABOVE Girl power: Stooshe’s self titled debut album is to be released on March 4
ABOVE RIGHT Key release: Future Cut have
produced the next single from Olly Murs’ third album. Army Of Two is out on February 25
“Someone once said the golden rule of music is never use your own money, but I think we’ve only ever used our own money. Sometimes that’s been disastrous and other times it’s been incredibly successful” DARREN LEWIS, FUTURE CUT
How have you managed to avoid falling foul of the industry pitfalls of recent years? Lewis:We’ve had to position ourselves as a little bit broader than just being sat in the studio the whole time. You’ve just got to be smarter and think more hands on and be willing to go take risks yourself. Someone once said the golden rule of music is never use your own money, but I think we’ve only ever used our own money. Sometimes that’s been disastrous and other times it’s been incredibly successful. You try and outweigh the not-so-successful with the successful and it’s been all right really. The days of just being sat in a studio producing bands at a low level is probably really tough now. So we get more deeply involved with projects such as Stooshe who are signed to our imprint - that’s a big change for us in that sense. But we’ve also got a publishing company, so we’re signing publishers, we’ve got a management company so we’re signing artists, just getting involved across the whole spectrum and doing little joint ventures with people.
The Music Producers Guild run the Credit Where Credit’s Due campaign – trying to get credit for producers on iTunes tracks, is that a bugbear of yours? Lewis: I think the people that really care are the people that are going to hunt that stuff down regardless. It
wouldn’t be a bad thing but there’s harder and tougher battles to fight, things like royalties from Spotify and YouTube - those are precedents that haven’t been set particularly well.
What kind of royalties have you been getting from said streaming platforms? Lewis: It’s pretty tiny relatively; a few radio plays would pretty much cover all the royalties from Spotify or YouTube. It’s something like 0.01p for a YouTube play. We went through all the royalty figures recently and when you added it up it was a few hundred, maybe a few thousand pounds if that, maximum - but we’re talking for millions and millions and millions of hits.
What would you change about the industry and why? Lewis: Private jets should come back! Babalola: I would bring in almost apprenticeship-like schemes for A&R people. So they know the difference between stems and multi-tracks, choruses and bridges, stuff like that, so when someone’s trying to describe something, they actually know what they are talking about.
Do you think there are a lot of A&R people working in the music industry today that don’t recognise those songwriting or recording essentials? Lewis: I’d say across the board there’s a fairly low understanding of the basic mechanics of making a record. George Martin essentially invented A&R and he was a producer, so his knowledge of the mechanics of making a record was very high and then his gut and business acumen were almost secondary. A lot of people just like a bit of music and then through liking a bit of music, might get involved. But on occasion it actually becomes counter-productive when you’re being asked for the wrong things.
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