Interview with Derek Bond, co-curator of Hacked at Theatre 503

Posted on October 11, 2011 by

HackedI recently wrote a piece for Wired on a show called Hacked, an artistic response to the phone hacking scandal, which featured a series of short plays all based on one or more voicemail messages contributed by anonymous (except for the one person named in my article and this interview) volunteers.

In the article I included two quotes from the co-curator of the project, and director of the opening play, Derek Bond, that were part of a much longer and very interesting interview. So, for fear of it festering on my hard drive forever more and never being used, I thought I’d put it up here.

Towards the end of the interview, we discussed Hacked in relation to another of Bond’s project, PLAYlist. Adopting pretty much the same format, this recurring show (now a fixture at the Latitude festival, as well as regular runs at Theatre 503) sees writers creating short plays based on songs. The only rule is that the play can’t be longer than the song that inspired it.

AM: How did this project come about and become what it is?
DB: Well, Telegraph theatre critic Dominic Cavendish has been involved in a couple of projects here. He did a thing called Decade a couple of years ago where we asked ten writers to all write a play, one for each year of the last decade, performed on New Year’s Eve 2010, and also Coalition, [where] we paired up other writers from other disciplines and had these sort of unlikely collaborations, and that was sort of examining what the coalition government was all about.

Then he suggested doing something about the phone hacking scandal, and so the artistic directors here, Tim Roseman and Paul Robinson, got in touch with myself and Lisa Cagnacci, who’s the programming director here, and we had a meeting and talked about ideas to do with phone hacking.

I think a lot of people are going to perhaps want to do something phone hacking related that is sort of a verbatim piece that talks about the courtroom drama of what’s been happening with that, the legal ins about outs of it, because it’s an interest scandal, but we want to look at the human story behind it and actually what effects it. What it’s about really is an invasion of privacy and we wanted to look at the sort of emotional feeling behind it. And also what actually is on people’s voicemails.

How would you feel if someone was listening to your voicemail? What sort of idea would they get about you? What would they learn from you? And would they have to fill in the gaps? The big thing we said to all of the writers was, “Don’t feel like you have to stick to the god’s honest truth, use your imagination and don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

AM: How long did it take to put the whole thing together?
DB: Well, Dominic came to us with the idea at the height of the scandal in July and we knew we had this slot that we wanted to do it in at the end of September/beginning of October. There was a worry that actually the story would have gone off the boil by then, [that] by the end of September it would be old news and no one would care about the hacking scandal, but it seems, you know, it’s the gift that keeps on giving to the media, it keeps on coming out and new revelations are coming out. There’s more revelations even just this week, which made the whole event seem very prescient.

Coming up with the idea was the work of an afternoon at a meeting sort of talking about it and thinking about it then refining it, then we commissioned the writers – we got the first drafts about two weeks ago in some cases – and then got directors on board straight away and most of the plays were rehearsed within a week. Because they’re all around ten minutes it’s been something that’s been relatively easy to put together. It’s a great way for us to get involved with a number of writers but also a number of directors who each take charge of their own play and they cast the actors of their choice, which means that you get a multitude of actors all involved who perhaps I’ve never seen or worked with before, but would definitely work with again.

AM: As well as directing one of the plays, what’s your involvement?
DB: So, I directed one of the plays and my involvement along with Lisa Cagnacci, who’s the other curator of the project, we commissioned the writers, chose which writers were going to be involved, and we got the directors involved as well, selected them and paired the writers up with the directors.

We also work on scripts before they actually end up in rehearsal, so we worked with some of the writers and suggested ideas and changes that they might want to make to the scripts before they finally started work with their own director, and obviously changes happen in rehearsal as well all the time, so it’s sort of really about overseeing the whole project and putting it all together and making sure the directors have got the support they need, and making sure the evening feels like a whole, rather than just six episodic, unrelated plays.

AM: You were about to tell me about Chris Beanland’s voicemail just now.
DB: Well, Chris’ voicemails were really interesting because, the other thing, I did all the recordings which meant that I’m one of the only people who’ve listened to all of the voicemails, and then having seen the scripts and then having seen the productions, er, because we’ve kept the voicemails secret, the directors haven’t heard them, and the actors haven’t heard them, only the writers heard them, and the writers and directors don’t know what the voicemails actually contained, or who left the voicemails

AM: So the recordings that were played in the theatre aren’t actually the original voicemails?
DB: A lot of them are recorded verbatim, any voicemails that you heard are actors who’ve recorded as they were heard, so those are the only ones. But having had that overview, it’s really interesting having seen, you know, what the writers have come up with and then what the directors have done.

There’s a very interesting couple of coincidences. In the play that was called Showmance by Anna Jordan about two people who’d met while working on a play and the re-meeting a year later on after their romance had sort of fizzled out, the director chose to cast a Northern Irish actress. And I happened to actually know that the person who owned the voicemail that sparked the play is also a Northern Irish actress, so it’s a very interesting coincidence that that’s all come about – a Northern Irish actress who’s inspired it, and you know, the director happened to cash a Northern Irish woman in the central role.

Also, in the play that was inspired by Chris Beanland’s voicemails, the writer originally wrote the character as named Christopher and I had to get in touch with him and say “I’m really sorry, but you’re gonna have to change the name”, because I guess it must have been left on a message and the writer, Ben Ellis, had no idea that Christopher was the name of the person whose voicemails he’d been listening to because we’d bleep out the names in the messages.

But Chris’ voicemails were very interesting because of course he’s a freelance journalist so he gets a lot of phonecalls from various people asking him to do things. So one of his messages was from somebody in an accounts department at a newspaper apologising for not paying him time, another phonecall was from a PR agency asking him to come to a particular event, another phonecall was from a PR agency asking him to go to another country for an event, another phonecall, you know, another PR agency, a commissioning editor, and then eventually some from his family as well.

What you get when you’re listening to a voicemail is you get little glimpses into people’s life, the different aspects of people’s lives, without actually any context for that, and any kind of understanding of where those pieces belong, and how they fit into someone’s life.

AM: So, it wasn’t based on one message?
DB: No, we told the writers to take inspiration from either one message or all the messages as a whole, in their wider context or to fill in the gaps. The play that I directed by Matt Hartley was inspired just by one message which was a message [from] somebody’s lawyer leaving a message about a house exchange that was going through and it seemed very innocuous. And that’s what Matt’s plays all about, how those things can be misinterpreted when taken out of context, because context is all.

AM: Without naming names, obviously, who are the people whose voicemails were used?
DB: Well, they come from a range of backgrounds. We advertised on Twitter and on Facebook and on the Theatre 503 website about, you know, saying we were doing this project, would people like to volunteer, and we had volunteers from all over.

Some people were from the theatre community, cos I guess those are the people that follow our feed, other people were from the journalism community, again I guess those are the people that follow the feed and were interested in the stories as well, and we also invited some people to get involved as well. So, there are some prominent journalists in there whose voicemails we’ve used and also people who work in bars, people who aren’t connected to any of those industries at all, either the theatre or the press, just ordinary everyday normal humans.

And I think that’s the interesting thing about it, it could be anybody’s voicemail. When we first talked about the project, we thought, you know, will anybody let us listen to their voicemails? And I thought, clearly I wouldn’t mind someone listening to my voicemails, and I just, I, er, then I listened to what was on my voicemail and was talking about that and, yeah, you kind of go, oh wait a minute, would I be comfortable with someone listening to this?

AM: Because there is the one play where everyone’s broadcasting everything in public…
DB: Yeah, it’s sort about the division, the dividing lines between what’s public and what’s private. I think that’s the point there. Because of course what the whole hacking scandal’s about is it’s taking something very private and something personal, somebody’s voicemail, and it’s shown it all to the world. And what we were doing is exactly the same, taking something that’s very private and then we’re showing it to a paying audience in a theatre.

Part of what I think about what’s interesting about the project is how it makes you feel sitting in the audience watching something that’s been inspired by a private message. It sort of makes you complicit in that, and I think in all of the hacking scandal, we as the public are complicit in that, because the reason why these newspapers did this is because they sold papers, and it’s just an interesting way to examine that and sort of ask the audience to examine that as well.

We’re all interested in people’s private lives, that’s why tabloid newspapers sell, that’s why gossip magazines sell, and I think what the Hacked project as a theatre piece does very well is ask everyone to examine that, that sort of voyeuristic interest in other people’s lives, as humans.

AM: Are you planning to do any more with this project? It’s only running for a week.
DB: Yeah, there’s been more interest in this project than we’ve had in almost any project we’ve done at 503. I think that’s largely because the media’s always interested in things that are about the media. The media is very very fond of itself. It’s why it’s been such a big news story and I think it’s why the theatre project has had so much interest as well.

There’s been pieces in the Guardian, in the Independent, I did an interview with Dutch television last week, it’s been covered by ABC in Australia, the Australian version of the BBC, French television came and did a piece on it. It’s had more international interest than anything that’s ever happened at 503, other than The Mountaintop, I think. And I think a lot of that is because the media is very interested in itself, which is understandable.

There’s been interest in other countries about perhaps doing something with the text that’s come out of it with these plays, potentially restaging it in other countries, which we’re looking into. In terms of the idea as a project, I mean as long as the hacking scandal is still in the news it’s still relevant. If it’s still there in six months time, potentially we could get six new writers to do exactly the same and repeat the same format, with six new writers listening to six new volunteers voicemails. But I think as long as it’s in the popular conscious it’s still an interesting format.

I think also what’s good about the format is that it doesn’t rely on necessarily on it being on the news. I think it’s interesting anyway, listening to somebody’s voicemails and using that as inspiration for a play. I think it would be an interesting project at any time with or without the hacking scandal. The hacking scandal makes it feel particularly prescient.

AM: There are similarities between this and PLAYlist, is that because you’re involved? You said it’s not your original idea but is it your format? You’ve just kind of applied the PLAYlist format to this?
DB: That’s right, I mean [in] PLAYlist obviously we ask writers to write plays inspired by songs and in that sense it’s similar, but we do a lot of things at 503 where we provide a stimulus to writers and ask them to write something shared off that and they tend to be multiple writer projects.

We do a thing called Rapid Write Response, which is where, when we have a show that’s running in the theatre for four weeks, we ask writers to come and watch it at the beginning of the run and then write a response play inspired by the themes or the characters, just a short play, and then we perform all those plays in one evening the last week of the play’s run on a set format plan. It’s a fascinating and a great way to get writers new and less experienced writers working alongside more experienced writers and expose them to an audience and see how they get on. We’ve always felt that writers should be developed on the stage at 503 and we wanted to put writers onto the stage and see how their work actually works in front of an audience.

But yeah, the idea of putting in an inspiration to a writer is similar to what we did with PLAYlist, the idea of using recordings as well and asking writers to sort of take an inspiration from an audio thing, yeah, it is a similar idea to PLAYlist and sort of how we came up with the idea was talking about formats we had like PLAYlist.

The big thing I should say about the format is it came out of a discussion about how we wanted the format to be the thing that reflected on the news story of phone hacking and we wanted to free up writers to write plays about whatever they wanted, to write plays about just human beings living their lives and tell a story. We felt if we asked the writers to write plays about the phone hacking scandal we’d end up with a lot of very tedious plays about Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch and newspaper problems and everything would be set inside an office and it would be very boring.

Doing it this way just meant it opened it up and the possibilities were endless, it doesn’t limit the writer’s creativity, it frees it.

Read my article on Hacked for Wired here.

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The week Steve Jobs died

Posted on October 7, 2011 by

Steve JobsWhen Apple launches a new product, you can be pretty sure that it will dominate the headlines for days. There are few news stories that can overshadow such an event because Apple has become so good at turning its product launches into just that: events.

Sadly, the one thing guaranteed to do it happened this week. Just 24 hours after Apple CEO Tim Cook announced the new iPhone 4S, his predecessor Steve Jobs, the man who developed the theatre and spectacle of the company’s announcements, succumbed to the cancer he had been suffering with since 2003.

It was only in August that Jobs stepped down as Apple’s CEO, taking on the role of Chairman instead. Although he had taken a number of leaves of absence from the company in recent years, usually prompting wobbles in Apple’s share price, he being so tied to its vision and ethos, he’d always returned (most recently against doctor’s orders to launch the iPad 2) seemingly with as much drive as ever.

However, two months ago he wrote in his resignation letter: “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come”.

I think most of us knew what that meant. Any man who can brush off pancreatic cancer and a liver transplant is going to have to be very ill indeed to admit that they can’t carry on. But still, I’m not sure any of us quite expected Jobs’ death to come so quickly and it is incredibly sad that a man with such a talent and flair for business died aged just 56.

As the news spread, tributes began to pour in, and such a respected figure was he that even the protesters occupying Wall Street, campaigning against the capitalist system of which Apple is part, felt the need to mark the sadness of his passing.

What this means for Apple as a company isn’t yet clear. Those wobbles in share price have become less pronounced more recently, and as Tim Cook (who had been established by standing in for Jobs whenever he was away) is generally seen as a suitable new leader, the company itself seems perfectly stable in business terms. Also, Apple’s long lead times on new products means that we’ll be seeing new devices that Jobs had a hand in producing for some time yet.

And so influential was he for many new entrepreneurs now rising up the ranks, such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Spotify’s Daniel Ek, his outlook will likely continue to resonate for many years to come.

Just the fact that I’m writing about him here, and assuming that you’re not wondering why I’m talking about some tech guy in a music publication, shows what influence Jobs had. Because, of course, he did do hugely important things for the music industry too. Whatever you think about it, this business would be a very different place without iTunes. By adding a music store to Apple’s music software in 2003 as a means of feeding the already dominant iPod MP3 player, digital music was gradually brought to the masses.

The iTunes Store still has around 75% market share in the digital music space despite facing competition from countless rivals over the years, including all the traditional players in music retail. That’s a huge achievement, and it seems unlikely any of its competitors over the years could have achieved something similar had the Apple platform never existed – either because they are targeting a niche audience, or because their technology is a turn off to many. Apple have always approached digital music with a mainstream agenda, and with a technology the masses can use.

And, of course, all this was just a tiny part of Jobs’ overall achievements. Earlier this year, Wired published this great piece on Steve Jobs’ life in business, how he thought and how he worked. Reading it, it’s hard not to be impressed and inspired by him.

This is taken from my editorial for CMU, which you can read in full here.

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Music vs Politics: Primal Scream mistake themselves for The Dandy Warhols, while Sony/ATV spots a disguised song in Nicaragua

Posted on October 7, 2011 by

It was the Conservative Party Conference this week, the third of the three main UK political parties’ annual get togethers.

As you’ll probably have seen, Prime Minister David Cameron sparked controversy when he suggested that everyone should help out the economy by just paying off their debts. Aside from the fact that he apparently thinks we’re all just in debt for the fun of it, we’ve previously been told to help the economy by spending more money, so I don’t know what to believe any more. I guess I’ll just pay off all my debts using a credit card. That should do it.

Next up, Home Secretary Theresa May suggested that the Human Rights Act should be repealed because the legislation, introduced by Tony Blair’s government to bring the European Declaration Of Human Rights into British law, had enabled an illegal immigrant to stay in the UK on the grounds that he had a pet cat. The judiciary quickly pointed out that this isn’t actually true, and then Justice Secretary Ken Clarke, a member of her own party, told the Nottingham Post that her claim was “laughable [and] childlike”.

But it was something else May did that got tongues wagging in the music world. Her choice of music to play her off stage has come in for much criticism.

It’s quite common for musicians to complain when right wing political parties use their music at public events without permission, most musicians having more left-wing leanings. In some cases this has led to copyright infringement claims, although in most countries playing music at public events is covered by blanket licences, so providing the venue owner or event organiser has general licences from the likes of PPL and PRS For Music no specific permission is needed from those who made or own specific songs.

As May left the stage, reports came in that she had walked off to ‘Rocks’ by Primal Scream. This seemed somewhat bizarre, it being quite openly about drug taking and prostitution. Still, that’s what people, mainly The Huffington Post, were saying, and as a result the band felt moved to issue a statement distancing themselves from the Conservative Party.

They said: “Primal Scream are totally disgusted that the Home Secretary Theresa May ended her speech at the Tory party conference with our song ‘Rocks’. How inappropriate. Didn’t they research the political history of our band? Hasn’t she listened to the words? Does she even know what getting your rocks off means? No. She is a Tory; how could she?”

They continued: “Primal Scream are totally opposed to the coalition government, Cameron, Osborne, Gove, Howard, Clegg etc. They are legalised bullies passing new laws to ensure the wealthy stay wealthy, taking the side of big business while eradicating workers’ rights and continuing their attacks on young people, single parents and OAPs by slashing education and social security budgets, and persecuting the poor for being poor. We would like to distance ourselves from this sick association”.

Finally, to really drive the point home, they said: “The Tories are waging a war on the disenfranchised, They are the enemy”.

To answer part of Primal Scream’s statement: No, May didn’t listen to the lyrics of their song before she made her speech. But that’s wasn’t because of any sort of arrogance or ignorance on her part, it’s just because she didn’t actually walk off stage to ‘Rocks’. When she left the stage it was ‘Bohemian Like You’ by The Dandy Warhols that was playing. Still something of an odd song choice, granted. But not ‘Rocks’ by Primal Scream.

This update to the story did not take long to make its way across the Atlantic and to The Dandy Warhols. Frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor was quick to respond, writing on the band’s official website: “Where do I bitch about this? I’ll tear their fuggin heads off. Well maybe not, but this happened to us in an Arkansas gubernatorial race and it makes me super angry. And then I wanna puke. Why don’t these assholes have right-wing bands make them some right-wing music for their right-wing jerk-off politics? Oh, because right wing people aren’t creative, visionary or any fun to be around. Nor are they productive or even introspective about it”.

He added: “Wait … neither are left-wingers [any of those things] come to think of it. Jesus, I tend to really dislike ANY people who take sides in politics. It is the single greatest contributor to getting nothing done. Fuck ‘politics’. What a joke. I give my charitable donations to people who get on a plane themselves and go to Haiti or Africa and help other people. Do you? NEVER to a political machine. I like to get shit done. You do too. Fuck, now I’m pissed off”.

So, there you go, they only had to play one song and the Tories pissed off two bands. Good work there. However, there was another story about a politician playing a song without permission this week, and this one wasn’t in the UK or the US. For this one we have to go all the way to Nicaragua.

Sony’s publishing company Sony/ATV has threatened to sue Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega if he refuses to stop using a reworked version of Ben E King’s R&B classic ‘Stand By Me’ in campaign videos. Re-titled ‘Nicaragua Triunfará’ (or ‘Nicaragua Will Triumph’), the new version of the song features lyrics in Spanish written by Ortega’s wife Rosario Murillo, and was produced by their son Maurice Ortega Murillo.

In a letter to Ortega’s Sandinista National Liberation Front, sent in July but published this week by Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa, Sony/ATV said: “This constitutes a serious infringement of Sony/ATV’s copyrights”.

As yet the party has not responded and is apparently still using the song in Ortega’s political campaign to be re-elected.

Here’s the offending video:

This article was originally published in CMU’s Beef Of The Week column. I also covered the Primal Scream/Dandy Warhols story in a separate article earlier in the week.

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American Juggalo

Posted on October 2, 2011 by

This short documentary made up of interviews with Insane Clown Posse fans at the annual Gathering Of The Juggalos is kind of fascinating. Partly it’s just intoxicated people saying stupid stuff, but the continuing theme of them all being a family is more than that. It’s kind of cult-like in a way. That connection also seems to mean that ICP don’t have to lay on much in the way of entertainment at their festival (aside from the music, fast food stands seem to be a particular draw). Makes good business sense, I guess.

I wonder if the guy with the sign around his neck managed to lose his virginity. Hopefully he stopped proclaiming a penchant for stabbing people. And wearing the sign.

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Facebook and Spotify have confused recommendations with shouting

Posted on September 30, 2011 by

On Sunday night I went to see Death Grips at XOYO in glittering East London. To say it was not really a Sunday night kinda show would be a bit of an understatement.

If you’re not familiar with Death Grips, they are MC Ride, producer Flatlander and Hella drummer Zach Hill. They make dark, unwelcoming, industrial hip hop, a sound which was represented on Sunday (other than by the music itself) by the lack of almost any discernable lighting or on stage banter. It was brilliant.

Mind suitably pummelled by the aggressive sounds of Death Grips, I stumbled out into late night Shoreditch and waited for my eyes to adjust to the night sky, which was considerably brighter than the lighting inside the venue.

The fact that I had just returned to London after a weekend in the countryside provided further contrast to add to my Sunday evening experiences.

I’m telling you about the contrasts I experienced the other night mainly so you can contrast this Editor’s Letter from last week’s, because I’m about to bang on about Facebook and Spotify again. Though with a week to reflect on the new look Facebook, and the various subsequent events relating to Spotify’s hook up with it, there are some new things to say.

As you’ll remember, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the social network’s big new redesign last week, and he put Spotify right at the heart of it. Although plenty of other content providers will be feeding endless amounts of user data into Facebook’s new activity tracker, it was Spotify’s Daniel Ek he called up on stage to talk about it. And although the latest redesign is yet to properly roll out, it’s Spotify which has probably garnered the most attention for hooking in to the evolving social network, though not with entirely positive results.

Spotify displeased a very vocal and sizeable minority of its users on Monday when it announced that from now on new users would have to sign up for the streaming service using their Facebook account. No Facebook account, no Spotify account. That’s it.

This assumes two things. Firstly, that everyone is happy to have a Facebook account. And secondly, that everyone who does is happy to use it to sign into other services. But not everyone in the world is a Facebook user, and many of those who are not – especially if they are web savvy enough to want to sign up to Spotify – have made a conscious decision, on whatever grounds, to not use the social network. Therefore, Spotify’s advice to just “set a Facebook account up and not use it” wasn’t very helpful. And even those who are Facebook users aren’t necessarily going to be comfortable with it having access to their wider online lives (even if it’s getting harder to stop that being so).

Then came the next change: Without really explaining properly what was happening, Spotify asked current users to agree to send data about every track they play via the service over to Facebook, so the social network could build a profile of their listening habits, and share details of every single track played with their friends. It is possible to turn this data sharing off, even if you inadvertantly allow it when presented with an update window by Spotify, but at the outset it wasn’t especially clear how to do this. Responding to criticism (and, to be fair, they did do this pretty quickly), Spotify added a ‘private mode’ to its software on Thursday.

Spotify argued that all these changes were justified because they added up to “creating an amazing new world of music discovery”. But even if you agree that this is where Facebook and Spotify are taking us, trying to force everyone to join them on their journey, from day one, isn’t really on, and is particularly unfair on those who object to having a profile on Facebook.

The way Spotify seems to have leaped so resolutely into the Facebook camp – and the way in which the company seemed to try to trick its customers to follow – was either a gross misjudgement, perhaps because the geeks at Spotify got carried away with Zuckerberg’s grand plans, or was perhaps the result of some sneaky deal with the social network, which got Ek top billing at Facebook’s party but tied his team to certain Facebook promoting commitments. Conspiracy theorists speculated that the reason Ek was so openly responding to criticism on Twitter on Monday night was so he could persuade Facebook to let him out of previous commitments.

That all seems a bit far-fetched – Ek was probably just doing the decent thing, and handling the critics head on rather than hiding behind a PR machine – but even if we assume good faith on Spotify’s part, and that they genuinely believe the Facebook hook up will deliver the holy grail of music discovery and that we’d be mad not to want to be part of it, does that justify the rush? After all, the immediate benefits of Spotify-hooked-to-Facebook for the user are few and far between (the benefits for Spotify itself, of course, are more obvious, the Zuckerberg induced hype has scored them a flood of new sign ups).

As I noted here last week, the changes Facebook are implementing provide a service akin to Last.fm – ie one that logs your online activity, and makes recommendations and tries to form communities based on your tastes – though rather than just logging the music you play on your computer, it will try to record everything you do online, from reading news stories to watching films. This information is then shared with your friends in real time. For the reasons outlined above (ie the almost forced participation), the newly shared data from Spotify is most obvious as a Facebook user, because now you’re being bombarded with information about every track every one of your friends (well, the opted in Spotify users) ever plays. It’s a huge amount of data I’ve subconsciously trained myself to ignore within five days.

It comes in constantly via Facebook’s new ‘ticker’. It flashes before your eyes so quickly it’s hard to take in, even if you’re not already ignoring it, which you almost certainly are. It’s hard to see how this will ever amount to an “amazing new world of music discovery”. Of course, this is presumably just stage one. But what’s stage two? Even if Facebook begins grouping together tracks, so it tells you “ten or so of your friends have listened to track X”, how does that help? It assumes that a play equals a recommendation. Which it doesn’t.

In my job I listen to a lot of new music that I definitely don’t want to inflict on others. Even some of the things I like, I might not want to explicitly recommend to all my friends. When Spotify announced its easier opt out button – the ‘private mode’ – it suggested this would be used to hide “guilty pleasures” you don’t want people knowing you listen to. But that misses the point – a play doesn’t equal a recommendation, whether it’s a guilty pleasure or not. On top of all that, because Facebook logs a track as soon as it begins playing, rather than (as Last.fm does) half way through, I found it was logging an awful lot of stuff I wasn’t actually listening to, but was skipping or stopping after a few seconds. Or on a couple of occasions, after I’d mistakenly clicked on a link and a track had automatically started playing. That doesn’t aid music discovery in any way at all.

By confusing tracks being played (or even just clicked on) with tracks being recommended, Facebook and Spotify’s bid to find this new world of music discovery is heading in the wrong direction. Which is why I’m not travelling with them, and have turned the tracking function off.

I’m hoping any of you out there who I’m friends with on Facebook appreciate my selfless act of not filling your newsfeeds with pointless information. I’ll continue to help out by not installing any other tracking apps either. Because, frankly, who wants to be told every time I click on a link to a news story, which I may or may not then read or enjoy or find useful or want to recommend. If I want to recommend something on Facebook, I’ll just carry on linking to it manually, as before.

Of course Facebook and Spotify will say “that’s fine, we’re not forcing you to join us in this brave new world, so stop your moaning”. Which is fair enough. Except I suspect sharing information via Facebook in the old way will become an increasingly infruriating thing to do, as partner websites make it harder to link to and embed content without installing their activity-tracking-apps. I say “suspect”, I’ve seen that happen already this week.

I don’t want to sound like a luddite, and I’m willing to accept Facebook’s data capture frenzy might – might – result in some genuinely interesting services down the line. But until it does Facebook is going to have to do a lot to convince me that these new changes are a good idea. For the first time since I signed up to the world’s biggest social media network I’m genuinely thinking I might have to give up on it. I’ll just stick to Twitter, or maybe I’ll give Google+ another go. Maybe this will be the making of Google+. We’ll see.

Or perhaps I’m sounding like a luddite because that’s what I’ve become, the lone moaner who harks back to the good old days of the internet, aka 2009. Is that what Spotify getting all these sign ups since its hook up with Facebook actually means? Maybe I’ll just go back to standing in the dark listening to aggressive hip hop. That’s the future, I tell you!

This is taken from my CMU editorial for this week. Read the whole thing, including some links to music I actually recommend you listen to, here.

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Bloc Party v Bloc Party

Posted on September 30, 2011 by

Bloc PartyRight, now I will grant you that this was not a story that really warranted almost 1200 words. However, it came time for me to write CMU’s Beef Of The Week column and this was the pop scuffle that most made me laugh this week. My second choice was Rihanna v an Irish farmer. But other than obsessing over his comment that she and her team should “acquaint themselves with a greater God”, I couldn’t see much scope for stringing it out for longer than I had in the original story. Bloc Party not knowing if they’d split up or not though; that I could labour to the point of ridiculousness. So, here you go…

So, this is most likely a big fuss about nothing. In fact, a cynic might suggest that this whole controversy over whether or not Kele Okereke is still Bloc Party’s frontman or not was some kind of carefully crafted PR stunt. But that cynic would be an idiot, because nothing about this seems careful at all, let alone crafted.

This story begins on 27 Dec last year, when a picture was posted to Bloc Party’s official Twitter profile showing all four members together (with a dog who had hitherto not been part of the band and has not been mentioned since). As people tried to decipher the cryptic message that was attached to the picture – “Merry Christmas from the Bloc” – experts all agreed that this meant that the band were definitely about to break the hiatus they had begun in 2009.

It looked more like that was a correct assessment in March, when Ash frontman Tim Wheeler told The Sun that Bloc Party guitarist Russell Lissack, who had been moonlighting with the band for about a year, was leaving. No one said he was leaving to rejoin Bloc Party, but hopes were raised further.

And those hopes were fulfilled the following month when Lissack confirmed that there was new Bloc Party material on the way. He told NME: “We met up at Christmas … and talked about doing another record. Kele and I started working on Bloc Party stuff together and separately. We’re having a bit of a break until the festivals are over, because people have commitments during the summer, but we’re going to get back properly in September and sit in a rehearsal studio to work on new band material”.

Bang! There you go, it’s happening. Definitely happening. Definitely. Except that come September, Okereke announced not that he was going into the studio with Bloc Party, but that he had already recorded a new solo EP and would be releasing it in October. Not very much about that would suggest he was about to start working with his bandmates on new Bloc Party material.

So, the obvious question came a few weeks later when he was interviewed by NME – what’s going on? “I was actually having lunch about three weeks ago, just here on Eighth Avenue and I saw somebody walk past and I recognised the haircut”, he said. “It was Russell. I was like: ‘Hey!’ but he didn’t see me and I followed him around the corner and then I saw Matt, Gordon and Russell [ie all his bandmates] all standing outside this rehearsal space. They all went inside”.

He added: “I hope I haven’t been fired. I don’t really know what’s going on, because we haven’t really spoken recently and I’m a bit too scared to ask”.

Asked to comment on Okereke’s remarks on Twitter, Lissack said: “I expect they [NME] will be announcing the auditions soon”. At the time, most took this to be a sarcastic comment, though a week later that is exactly what happened. Well, sort of.

In an interview with the music weekly, the guitarist said: “It’s not really a secret because Kele’s been pretty busy doing solo stuff and it looks like he’s going to be doing that a bit longer. The other three of us wanted to meet up and make music. We were talking about just doing an instrumental thing, but now we might get a singer as well, to properly put some music out and play some shows”.

Confirming that there had been no contact with the band’s former frontman, he added: “I haven’t spoken to Kele for a couple of months, I guess since the festivals when I was doing stuff with Ash. But there’s no bad vibes”.

That’s right, Lissack returned to Ash as well. Who’s the real bad guy here? It doesn’t really matter, the story was broken – Kele Okereke is being replaced as the frontman of the band he co-founded and that made him famous. His bandmates planned to carry on without the very man that many would probably see as their key member. Shocking news.

Of course, Lissack never actually said that Okereke was out of the band. Actually, saying “Kele’s been pretty busy doing solo stuff and it looks like he’s going to be doing that a bit longer” would more likely suggest that Lissack expected Okereke to come back at some point. But whatever, it did seem that the other members of Bloc Party were planning to do something without him.

Commenting on the NME story, Okereke wrote on his blog: “Hmm, I don’t know what to make of this. A big part of me is laughing HARD at all of this but another part of me is all like WTF? I’m quite curious as to what a Bloc Party audition would be like? I wonder if they would let me sit on the panel so I could be a judge Tyra Banks style?”

Maybe he could, that sounds like fun. And reality TV shows have been created on flimsier premises. Plus it would be fine, because Okereke is actually still a member of the band. We know this because Si White, who co-manages both Bloc Party and Kele’s solo career, tweeted on Wednesday: “For those that keep asking, Bloc Party’s membership consists of the same four people it has consisted of since 2003″.

To confirm, those people are Russell Lissack, Gordon Moakes, Matt Tong… and Kele Okereke.

The same day, the Bloc Party website was insisting that “Bloc Party is still Bloc Party”. Although that does tell us less about the current line-up. I mean, The Sugababes are apparently still The Sugababes, aren’t they?

But I think what’s happened here is simple confusion has allowed this story to run out of control. Back in April when he announced that the band were planning to work on new material, Lissack also said: “I’ve really missed playing some of our songs again. The time away has really just reignited the passion I have for Bloc Party”.

The real story, the story it’s somehow taken over 1000 words to get to, is that three quarters of Bloc Party are planning to do something together that might be quite cool, but which will ultimately be something of a side project while they wait to get back to work properly once Kele is available. They probably should have let Kele know this though.

But anyway, narked that they are being accused of making up the whole thing, the folks at NME have released the audio of their recent interviews with Okereke and Lissack conducted by writer Dan Smith, so you can make your own mind up.

Kele:

Russell:

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Mark Zuckerberg and the verbs

Posted on September 23, 2011 by

Andy MaltSo, after months, nay years of speculation, yesterday Facebook announced its new music offering. It wasn’t, as many had once thought, an in-house music service, nor did it bring Spotify streaming in-browser, as was also suggested. It was, basically, a polished up version of Last.fm.

Actually, Facebook’s announcement yesterday does mean some pretty drastic changes to the biggest social network, changes that may over time alter the way we interact with content online. If you allow it to, Facebook will now not only log every song you ever listen to via Spotify et al (just like Last.fm), it’ll also log pretty much everything else you’ll ever do online. All automatically. And it will inform all of your friends as you do so, while mapping it all out on a handy timeline of your entire life. Scared?

Mark Zuckerberg’s explanation of all these changes was pretty long and tedious (as much as he tried, he’s no Steve Jobs) but he pretty much summed it up when he said:

“This year, we’re adding verbs”.

He said it as if the concept of verbs was something people might not have heard of yet. As if Facebook was in the process of inventing language. But what he meant was that you’ll no long have to click the ‘Like’ button to share things on Facebook, the sharing will just happen as you listen to, watch or read anything online. And if you cook something too. He talked a lot about cooking. Though I’m not sure how that could be automated, unless he knows something about net connected ovens that I don’t. He also said “express” more times that I thought possible in an hour.

Anyway, bringing this back to music, the big deal here is that music services will be able to log your listening data in your Facebook profile (or ‘timeline’ as it is to become known). Your friends will be able to see what you’re listening to, and if they’re interested they’ll be able to listen to the same track at the click of a button. You can even share a track directly with someone and both listen to it together at the same time while discussing it on Facebook’s instant messenger.

Now, these are all things you could, to an extent, already do, but in theory the new look Facebook makes everything a lot easier. Zuckerberg also talked a lot about “frictionless experiences”, and that’s relevant here. As I said, a lot of this new functionality can already be achieved with Last.fm and other social media apps and tools. But Facebook is, for most people, the de facto online service for sharing comments and content. And while people may be interested in music discovery, many have not been interested enough to sign up to bespoke services. This will bring the music discovery to the place where they are already sharing online.

And it won’t really matter which music service you are using to discover new artists and tracks, because pretty much all of them will be hooked up to new look Facebook. Though yesterday everyone’s focus seemed to be on Spotify’s involvement. It must have been something of a disheartening moment for some of the bigger US streaming services to see the new kid (in their market), Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, wander on stage at Facebook’s big event to explain how his service will integrate with the new look social network.

And while Zuckerberg said he wanted to “rethink the music industry”, Ek said the hook up would boost engagement and draw more people to a system that “fairly compensates artists”.

Interestingly, that last claim was at the heart of the other big digital music story this week: Is Spotify giving artists a good deal? Spotify proudly announced this week that it now has over two million paying subscribers, news that won’t please the co-founder of metal label Prosthetic Records EJ Johantgen, who told LA Weekly that “there [does] not appear to be an upside” to having your music on Spotify as he pulled the label’s catalogue from the service.

Prosthetic is the third US metal label to pull its catalogue off Spotify since it launched in the States in July, following Century Media and Metal Blade. Johantgen argued that the “fractions of pennies” Spotify pays per stream do not compare well with the revenues to be made from downloads and physical releases. And in his view, having your music on Spotify will drive down CD and download sales as time goes on (although download subscription service eMusic published research this week that suggested ‘ownership’ of music remained important to many consumers, despite the rise of ‘access’ based services, with many users of Spotify-like platforms still buying MP3s).

As well as Prosthetic, self-releasing indie band Uniform Motion also announced they were pulling their music off the streaming service, and in an attempt to explain why published an entire breakdown of how much money they earn from every possible avenue, including retail, pay-what-you-want downloads, publishing and more. Spotify, they said, just doesn’t come up with the goods.

Spotify responded to all this by pointing out that it’s unfair to compare its payouts to download sales, because it doesn’t “sell streams”, rather, it sells access to a whole catalogue of music. Spotify would rather, I imagine, you think of its service in terms of radio, and the fact that seven million streams through its software will earn an artist far more in royalties than if a song is heard by seven million listeners all at once by having their song played on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show.

However, while Spotify is not a download store (assuming we ignore the fact that it has a sideline selling MP3s too), it’s not a radio station either. It may sell access to music, but users can still access that music on demand, like they would a download in iTunes.

But anyway, that, said Uniform Motion, was not even the issue. The problem, they said, is that Spotify is so secretive about its business model. It’s entirely possible the band were getting a fair cut of advertising revenue and subscription fees, but because Spotify doesn’t explain how it divvies up the money between the various people due a payment, no one actually knows.

Now this isn’t entirely Spotify’s fault. The reason we know how much money an artist gets from a play on Radio 1 is because radio is licenced by collecting societies PPL and PRS via a transparent blanket licence. But digital services can’t do that, they have to do deals with individual rights owners or their representatives (such as the indie sector’s Merlin). Even when rights owners decide to use their collecting societies for digital deals, the arrangements are often clouded in secrecy. In the case of the major labels, it’s assumed that they insisted on a larger cut of Spotify’s revenues in order to play ball. And Spotify’s founders, who needed all of that major label music in their system to be able to get enough traction with the public, had to roll over. And also had to sign the non-disclosure agreements barring them from saying what those cuts were.

So, Spotify may be stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to transparency, but that doesn’t alter the fact that a lot of smaller artists and indie labels therefore assume they’re getting ripped off.

One solution to this would be to apply the methods used to licence radio to streaming services. Stop lumping streaming music with downloads – Spotify is right when it says the two services are not the same – and instead think of streaming platforms as interactive radio services, and licence them like radio, through transparent blanket licences, probably administered by collecting societies or some similar organisation. This would add transparency to the whole system and ensure that everyone was getting their fair share.

It would also mean that online services unwilling or, more likely, unable to meet the demands of the big rights owners would be able to get their services off the ground. Having more digital services has to be a good thing. Sure, Mark Zuckerberg and Daniel Ek might be clever, but their success has, in part, been down to their skill and luck in securing big money investment. There are other clever but less cash-rich people who – if the industry would just help them get the licences they need in an easier fairer way – could also help build a more diverse and engaging digital music marketplace. Which is almost certainly the best solution to that tedious piracy problem.

This is my editorial for CMU this week. You can see the whole thing (there’s even more of it, yes) right here.

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