18MusicWeek 23.08.13 VIEWPOINT BILLY BRAGG
‘MAJOR LABELS: WAKE UP AND GIVE YOUR ARTISTS THE POWER TO SELL’
Billy Bragg considers the economics of the music business’s digital age - and calls for a new industry-wide, artist-centric commercial model
TALENT n BY BILLY BRAGG
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his year marks the 30th anniversary of the release of the first Billy Bragg record, Life’s a Riot with Spy vs Spy, but my career
in the record industry stretches back into the previous decade. In 1972, aged 14, I got a Saturday job in a hybrid
hardware/record store, Guy Norris in Barking, east London. Sounds strange now, but it wasn’t uncommon to find such a split, with the father running the original business while the son set up shop in the basement. On the ground floor, I was employed selling
screws, paint and wallpaper paste. Sometimes, I helped out behind the counter downstairs in the record store when they were short staffed. Ten years later, just out of the Army and looking
for work, I met one of my old Guy Norris colleagues running another store in the town centre. Low Price Records had a handful of shops across north-east London and sold ‘cut-outs’ – mostly album stock that was no longer available on a sale-or-return basis and had been marked as such by having a piece of the cardboard sleeve physically cut out. I remember visiting their warehouse – a disused
church in Stratford – which at the time contained thousands of copies of an all-star album called ‘All This And World War Two’ - the soundtrack for a movie that juxtaposed covers of Beatles songs with newsreel footage from the Second World War. It probably seemed like a great idea at the time. Low Price Records also bought bankrupt stock,
most notably a truck-load of albums from the old EMI India pressing plant at Dum Dum, outside Calcutta. A very shrewd buy, these albums - mostly Bollywood soundtracks from the ‘60s and ‘70s, plus a few Indian classical masters - were very popular with the South Asian population in the East Ham branch where I worked. Low Price kept me solvent while I was doing
my first solo gigs in 1982. The shop manager, Steve Goldstein, was a musician himself, so understood when I needed to leave early to get to a gig. He also had one of those new-fangled Portastudio things
RIGHT Fresh thinking: Billy Bragg says that some indie record companies already allow artists to sell their releases direct to fans
www.musicweek.com
“Fans have an emotional bond with their favourite artist. If we expect them to pay for music, we must show that their money goes to that artist”
and invited me over to record the demo tape that subsequently got me my first deal. Of course, Low Price Records is long gone, like
almost every other high street chain. And yet I find myself back in the retail sector of our industry once again. Since the turn of the century, there have been three official Billy Bragg albums, not counting the Mermaid Avenue records. In that same time, I have self-released five CDs
for sale direct to the public at gigs and via mail order. Two have been live albums, another featured songs recorded by my old band Riff Raff, one was the soundtrack for a play and the most recent is a compilation of tracks that had been available as free downloads from my website over the past decade. All this has been made possible by the internet.
While the digitisation of music has led to the decline of the record store, it has narrowed the gap between artist and consumer. In the old days, we had to rely on the music
press to promote our products. But even getting into the NME didn’t mean you’d necessarily reach your fans. The internet gives us the possibility of targeting our audience, of making sure that announcements of new products and dates reach those who want to hear about them.
Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner of
Digital Agenda, recognised this sea-change when she said recently that the record industry needs to put the artist at the centre of the new digital business model. Stronger laws alone will not arrest the decline in sales. Most fans have a strong emotional bond with their favourite artists and if we expect them to pay for their music, we must convince them that the money they spend goes into the pockets of the artists they love. A simple way to do this would be for major
labels to give artists the contractual right to sell their own material via their websites. For instance, if labels offered tracks to artists at
the same rate as they do for iTunes, it could be possible, by adding the artists royalty to the retail mark up, to argue that artists get the biggest slice from tracks bought via their own websites. Labels would still get their same cut, but they
would also have artists actively promoting back catalogue and out-takes to their fan-base – giving material that may have been overlooked a new lease of income-generating life. Some independent labels have already
recognised that the internet has placed the artist at the forefront of interaction with consumers. It’s about time the mainstream record industry woke up to that fact and gave us the power to sell.
n Billy Bragg will collected his AIM Award for Outstanding Contribution in London on September 3.
Musicindie.com/awards
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