And boy, is there new material out there. Every school and college has a recording studio. Our children rush to Music Tech and Music Production courses like a


Newcastle-Sunderland Derby.


Toon fan to the In the


absence of record deals, bands gig - constantly.


The quality and breadth of live and original music, from Austin Texas to Gamla Stan Stockholm, is astonishing, a tidal wave of experienced, passionate musicians who know how to play live and are tighter than an Ambassador batter head on a snare drum.


The last time the live music scene was this good, the Beatles were playing the Kaiserkeller.


That period


produced the musical revolution of the ‘60s; now, wise people who know their music discern a similar wave coming, the product of a huge, global, pent-up stream of tight, gigging bands, itching to be discovered, playing staggeringly well.


They can record music in their bedrooms to a higher standard and lower cost than ever before in history. They write, play and record. They just need an outlet.


Where will all this music go? Not into Spotify, Pandora, and iTunes, that’s for sure.


big thing.


They’ll never discover the next They exist mainly to shift


product from the already-enormous. This is useless for new and emerging artists, since there’s little point being the undiscovered needle in a huge digital haystack. So how will new music get heard? How do we find the next Beatles, Chilli Peppers or Radiohead?


Every


school and college has a recording studio. Children rush to Music Production courses like a Toon fan at the Newcastle-Sunderland Derby


46 entrepreneurcountry


That’s what I thought Digital Music Forum would debate. It’s the number one issue in music today; how to track down the best new music if you’re a fan, how to get discovered if you’re a muso.


There are a few businesses


addressing the need, SoundCloud and Bandcamp as well as us at Amazing, but, just as in New York, there’s too much reliance on algorithms.


This


is because most start-ups are run by kids. They like technology.


Wrong. You can’t code for taste, experience and gut feel. It’s impossible to synthesise the instinct of an A&R man who judges a band by watching the audience (not the performers), to see how they react.


That’s why


Amazing relies on DJs on our national radio station – dozens of them, all with years of experience, all encouraged to play whatever they like. In music discovery, curation is the cure.


Another commonly misplaced thread is copying. I don’t mean Napster-style theft; I mean people playing safe, doing the same as everyone else. The day I spoke at DMF, influential music industry blogger Bob Lefsetz posted about The Brit Awards. He said they were better than the Grammys, ‘because in the UK it’s about the music, in the US it’s about entertainment’.


He posed


the question: ‘can you imagine Adele emanating from the States?’ I quoted him in my DMF speech, saying I was certain that, in major labels across the world, unimaginative men would be trying to find ‘the next Adele’, just as in Hollywood, similar people will right now be laying plans to make a silent film in black and white. Preferably with a cute dog.


It’s the curse of the creative industries: organisations that have the cash, have no vision. They specialise in ‘Me Too’.


As soon as they spy a


bandwagon, they try to leap on it. It’s particularly bad in the States, where ‘revolutionising music’


is


interpreted as ‘a hot new mobile app that’s social and local and has a killer interface’.


The focus is on


the technology and its self-identified coolness, not the audience and its need.


In theory, the market should address this. You’d think the enormous interest in start-ups (and the wodges of cash available to them) would encourage lots of genuinely new ideas to appear. But the smart youngsters with the hot start-ups seem to me to be looking elsewhere, focusing on social, wondering how they can be the next Twitter or Pinterest, purloining as much private data from their users’ mobiles as they can get away with, ignoring music altogether because it’s not as ‘of the moment’ as SoLoMo, or doing crazy deals with labels which will prevent them ever being profitable, and eventually kill them. In New York, and at South by SouthWest a few weeks later, I heard plenty of chat, but saw no insight; I met lots of people who are passionately committed to doing something …. just a tiny bit different from everyone else.


On one of my many internal US flights, I puzzled over why people gravitate to technology and ‘Me Too’ instead of taking a blank sheet of paper and imagining the music industry from scratch, as we have done at Amazing. I think it’s a product of scale, a consequence of geography and success. When you’re in that milieu, living in the Silicon Valley Bubble, meeting your competitors in every Starbucks, it’s very hard to think different (pun intended).


This has a


homogenising effect just as damaging as American Idol. You’re so acutely aware of what other people do, so desperate to be the next big thing, you hedge your bets and look for variations on a widely-accepted theme, instead of creating an original composition. Living in a hermetically-sealed, technologically-focused


bubble,


technology trumps creative thought, making it, ironically, much harder to be genuinely different. So nobody thinks outside the box. It’s extraordinary.


Brilliant, in fact. Many years ago, G. K. Chesterton said, in his usual sardonic way, ‘It’s a pity that radio was invented before anyone had anything to say’. He meant that creating technology doesn’t create a need for it. (He had a point: Marconi thought the purpose of radio was to allow ships to communicate in


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