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Karma County's Brendan Gallagher penned this song and recorded an original version with spoken-word lyrics but felt his own voice wasn't quite right. It needed something more Australian, more gravelly. He knew someone who knew someone who worked for Bryan Brown, Australian actor of past Hollywood fame.

Brendan worked up the courage to write to Brownie and ask if he'd consider recording the track with the band and appearing in a music video. The actor said yes, because his kids thought it was a hilarious idea that their dad might appear in a pop song.

TV gardener Costa Georgiadis was a long-time friend and supporter of the band, and his mum's pristine 1950s Sydney home was used as the location, with original furnishings in place. Costa's unmissable face plays an essential role in the last few frames of the clip. Bryan Brown's own classic brown Holden Kingswood stars in the opening shot and other friends of the band and director Sean Kennedy play the support roles.

Littoral Records covered the extremely minimal production budget. We don't usually assist with music videos but this was a one-in-a-million opportunity and the result speaks for itself. 

Dexter & Sinistra from bigyahu on Vimeo.

Dexter & Sinistra © 2010 Karma County All rights reserved.

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And even Mazzy Star's 'Fade Into You' was released in 1994, when most of us had no idea the interweb existed. Does this mean Blip.fm users are older? Perhaps with desk jobs and web access through the day? Or does rock and roll truly never die?

#industrytrends #onlinemusic

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In 2008 my wife, son and I spent three weeks living amongst a little Tibetan community in the Himalayan village of Tabo, in the Spiti Valley region of India. While there I was approached by a local guesthouse owner, Sonam Tsering, who was active in preserving the traditional and modern music of the Spiti region.

A few years previously, Sonam had ventured down through the high mountain passes with some musical instruments and with two of his friends, Phuntsok Baba and Yashe Phuntsok. They went to a town large enough to have some recording equipment and laid down some tracks — modern Spiti music celebrating some of the cultural and spiritual values of their community.

However, they didn’t have the money to get very many copies of their CD made, and by the time I arrived, Sonam only had one copy left. He was depressed about it because he didn’t know how he would be able to make more copies, and he was worried that the Spiti style of music was threatened with extinction.

Enter Littoral Records!

I made a copy of Sonam’s last CD on my MacBook and took notes while Sonam translated the lyrics and gave me enough background information for some liner notes.

Back in Sydney I created an album cover, an ISBN number and set the album up for sale on Bandcamp at http://thespitisound.bandcamp.com

Bandcamp is a great way to release music that might be of interest to a worldwide audience, but which is never likely to be a Top 20 blockbuster. Bandcamp costs nothing to set up, you get all the proceeds of each sale, and you get to set your own pricing. It takes very little time to set a page up, and Bandcamp scores well on Google searches.

I’ve spent no time marketing the Spiti Sound album but today I’m very happy to announce that Bandcamp has sold the first copy of the album online. Sonam, Phuntsok and Yashe will be receiving 100% of the proceeds and the money will go towards bringing musicians and artists together from all over the Spiti region to share, collaborate and record more Spiti music.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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As the old saying (kinda) goes, “If you love something, set it free. If there’s enough advertising revenue to sustain it, it’ll love you back.” Billboard.com, the originator of the music industry behemoth which is the Hot 100 and Billboard 200 charts, has got-with-the-program and is now offering free access to its complete archive of charts, reports PaidContent.org.

Billboard is betting that its chart archives, free streaming/paid download music from Lala.com and ticketing integration with Ticketmaster will be a big enough draw to keep advertising revenue high. Personally, I doubt it.

First: you’ve got to be global to succeed and Billboard has ignored its substantial global audience and brand by signing up partner services that are geographically restricted to the US domestic marketplace.

Second: to leverage the power and the brand of the Billboard Hot 100 and extend them across the broader interweb, we need to see those rich data archives addressable through an API. Billboard has to get more open and more free, or I predict it will soon drop off its own charts.

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If you’re like me, the problem is not finding money to buy great music, it’s finding great music in amongst all the chaff and crud shoved out there by the majors.

Radio? TV? With very few exceptions, forget about it — way too much noise-to-signal. Magazines? Maybe, if you can recall the name of the artist, album and track next time you’re buying music. Podcasts and blogs? Certainly, but that’s all a bit obvious, innit?

I have lots of other ways to find new music I’ll love, some of which I now realise is not commonly used by other music fans. So over the course of a few blog posts I’ll try to jot down some suggestions for great ways to find good music. Here’s a cracker: walk into a public library with your laptop and look for shared iTunes libraries:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

See, these days, public libraries are full of cool people with laptops seeking a comfy chair, free wifi, a power outlet and sometimes if you’re really lucky, great coffee. The Wellington, NZ city public library where I’m writing this is great source for all of the above.

It’s an under-utilised feature many iTunes users don’t know about, but you can choose to share your iTunes music library with other users on your LAN, and you can also browse and play the shared libraries of other iTunes users.

Coworking spaces and large companies with flexible IT policies can also be good locations.

You can’t copy or rate the songs on someone’s shared iTunes library, but really, considering the relationship the music industry has to copyright law, it’s a small miracle they allowed Apple to even let us play each other’s music.

So here I am in Wellington and somebody’s sharing a library containing a big back catalogue of Kiwi native Dave Dobbyn’s music. Since discovering him on the soundtrack to the NZ film Footrot Flats years ago I’ve been meaning to get some more of his music. It’s great diverse, interesting and thoughtful music, with some similarities to Elvis Costello and Neil Finn and you could do worse than come away from your NZ visit with a few choice tracks of his, Bro, eh?

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Littoral Records is your home of what we like to call the “Coastal” genre of music - something that has a relationship with the sea and the surf and the sun. In that vein, you should definitely check out a new Australian documentary about an enigmatic, controversial Australian surfing champion from the 1970s, “Searching for Michael Peterson”.

As a lad I was just old enough to know a little of his infamy though nothing about the circumstances behind his disappearance from professional surfing and the strange direction his life took.

This film answers those questions and it does so with an awesome soundtrack that’s available for online purchase in MP3 on Vitamin Records - you should definitely score that too.

Here’s the trailer for the film, including a little of the music and some great retro footage.

Searching for Michael Peterson Trailer from jolyon hoff on Vimeo.

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Social music service Last.fm is my online radio station of choice. The Last.fm ‘scrobbler’ patiently notices all the music I play on iTunes and on my iPhone and makes recommendations I should listen to when I’m playing my Last.fm radio at my desk. If there’s stuff I’m listening to that I don’t own and want to buy, Last.fm makes it easy to buy a track or an album from iTunes Store. If the Last.fm recommendations aren’t exciting me today I can tune in to the tracks being played by people ‘like me’ on Last.fm.

So here’s a great idea: the best music of 2008 as scobbled by Last.fm users (well, minus the final few days of the year I guess.) Well worth a listen if you need to keep up with what Kids Are Listening To These Days.

The Last.fm Best of 2008 has introduced me to my new favourite band of the week: Glasvegas, who I’d describe as a mix of Futureheads and Teenage Fanclub with Phil Spector doing the mix.

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But Santa's counting on me to upload music for all the little girls and boys who've been good and don't pirate music!

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Arriving on stage in those early days with just a snare drum, acoustic guitar and double bass, they foreshadowed the acoustic roots movement that has become an essential element of contemporary music. 

Since those small beginnings they have grooved their way into the hearts and minds of discerning fans and critics, delivering five outstanding and timeless albums, the last of which, 2004’s Pacifico was released by Littoral Records (buy it here on iTunes Store).

Now Karma County have released a 2-disc retrospective collection, Headland. It’s  a must-have, with 36 tracks across 2 discs containing songs from all 5 albums, including 2000 ARIA winner Into The Land Of Promise. 

It also debuts previously unreleased tracks and live performances - remixed, revisited, remastered. Stand outs are the two new tracks; the new original The Feeling and a breezy cover of Yazoo’s Only You.

You owe it to yourself, you owe it to Australian music. Go check it out on the Vitamin store, where you can preview tracks and get your own copy the old-fashioned way - in the mail, on a couple of CDs. 

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In this interview, Elvis Costello talks about his upcoming TV series, ‘Spectacle’, where he takes on the role of talkshow host, interviewing other great music artists and jamming with them.

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Great boy/girl harmonies, some crunchy guitar, very clever lyrics and heaping spoonfuls of energy. This is 20 Minute Loop on their album ‘People Marry Famous People’ - my favourite new listening of the week. Check them out…

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Lala’s CEO is Geoff Ralston, who used to head Yahoo!’s communications business. This being Lala’s third reincarnation, I wonder if the backers have just told Ralston to do what ever the majors want in order to licence a decent catalogue? Because this iteration feels like something major labels want more than something consumers want. Hence the geographical limit preventing users outside the US from using Lala. Not even Yahoo! Music has geographical restrictions on its streamed music.

Yes, there’s a difference in consumer benefit between per-track on demand similar music on demand, but not $0.10’s worth. We have to expect that a wide variety of music licensing models will be tested in this brave new world and only a fraction of them will make it. I’m betting this one won’t.

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I’m loving The Feeling’s music at the moment, particularly the 2006 song ‘I Love It When You Call.’

Then it struck me how good it would sound as a ringtone on my iPhone.

Just in case you think it would sound great on your iPhone too, here’s the ringtone I made.

(Just drag it onto iTunes and it should appear in your list of ringtones.)

Don’t thank me, just buy the album, it’s great!

• Twelve Stops and Home on iTunes Store US
• Twelve Stops and Home on iTunes Store Australia

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In Canada, PWC forecasts that music downloads will exceed physical music sales by 2011. That’s no longer amazing, though it would have seemed so to the music industry five years ago. Now it’s just further confirmation of what we already knew - the music industry is undergoing change at of such magnitude and pace as to be almost indistinguishable from extinction.

It’s not so much the fact that it’s happening but the rate at which its occurring. In 2007, the Canadian download market was less than a quarter of the size of the physical sales market, yet in only four more years the minnow will overtake the whale due to the rapid rate of change - the decline in Canadian CD sales, for instance, was 11.9 per cent in 2006 and 19.8 per cent in 2007.

So far, all shocking stuff that no longer shocks. The unanswered question is: where will the CD market bottom-out? How many CDs can the industry still expect to sell in, say, 2020?

Remember, the music industry still supports a small but healthy market for vinyl records. It’s still possible to buy movies on VHS tape. Everything we’ve learned about new media in the past 30 years tells us that no medium becomes extinct; it just assumes a minor niche in a richer, more diverse marketplace of media.

Could CDs become the default medium for servicing developing markets such as Africa that don’t yet have the disposable income and mobile carrier penetration to support a mass market of mobile handset downloads? Could the physical music production component of the music industry cushion its fall by repositioning to focus on servicing developing markets? My guess is no; that either the disposable income won’t increase fast enough or the penetration of mobile carriers will make the window too narrow and short-lived.

Having done some work in mobile content and mobile social networks, I’ve seen for myself how quickly African consumers have leapt onboard and adopted mobile technologies. Even (and perhaps because of) in cities where there’s almost no terrestrial internet access and where mains electricity is available for only a few hours a day, mobile handsets have become the communication tool and social glue for not only resident communities but the broader diaspora created by the guest worker industry, refugee resettlement and overseas study programs.

Instead I’d expect developing nations to create a new class of music consumer; one who wants to mix western top 20 artists with a melange of local artists and music genres.

For the next decade or so handset storage on low-end phones will be limited to a few gigabytes so this consumer won’t be able to stay loyal to a small set of artists or brands. Instead they will delete/download/delete/download, choosing new content over keeping old content. You’d be wasting your time trying to build a multi-song or multi-album relationship with them.

Music and video content will be intermingled and video will be listened to as much as watched since content will be chosen from mobile portals that tend to blend the two together to increase the odds of a download from limited screen real estate.

Distant future? Hardly. Here’s a living, breathing example of the music consumer of the future, who I found on a train between Delhi and Chandrigarh last July, grooving along to bangra dance music on his mobile while his battery held out.

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Yeah, mebbe. It’s driving me nuts. Once again I’m late getting a sales report to an artist on my label because pulling together the numbers from iTune Store is as much fun as pulling teeth. So operating on the principle that there’s other small labels out there dealing with the same issues, I would certainly be interested in talking to some other small labels to see whether there’s a market for a web application that would do all the legwork here.

Struggling artists waiting to get paid because iTunes is so bad at reporting on sales

Here’s the problem I face and you probably face too: iTunes’ label management site  site spits out reports that are one big tab-delimited text file per label, per month, per territory. That’s about as friendly and helpful as being handed a bag of bolts and a wrench and being told to build your own train each time you buy a subway ticket.

If i were bigger than i am (i can dream, can’t I?) i might have 10 artists, each with 2 albums, each comprising 12 tracks, each of which might also exist as a ringtone, music video, iTunes Plus or iTunes music file.  Consumers can buy single tracks or whole albums, so my monthly report (again, if i were bigger) might contain 50-100 or more rows. There’s a monthly report for each territory (US, Canada, Europe and UK, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.) Each file needs to be chunked up in Excel so I can generate reports for each artist’s management that include total iTunes sales for the month, and sales per album.

All that’s doable for someone who’s good with Excel, but here’s the thing: all the people who are good at Excel do NOT work in the music industry. The people who are good at looking stylish, maintaining vapid meaningless conversations at shouting level in a crowded bar, who picked on the kids who were good at Excel work in the music industry.

Large record labels who have their own accountsperson can get by OK, but there’s a large and growing number of micro-labels out there thanks to teh interwebs and Mac-based production software who can’t afford their own accountsperson.

Many labels report to their artists quarterly, so combining three months of reports across six territories, and then splitting them up per artist and per album is a huge buttpain.

In a perfect world, I’d have a website I could count on to take care of a lot of that text munging for me, that would let me spit out formatted Excel reports on any of the variables of artist, album, media format, territory, date range, etc. All I would need to do would be to upload my text files I’ve downloaded from iTunes’ label site. Maybe it could even hookup to MYOB and Quickbooks and straight into sales ledgers.

I think labels would love having an archive of reports saved on the site they could check back on at any time, and pump out reports tracking trends in sales across different time periods. Don’t get me started about pretty graphs.

On the input side, there’s also the question of iTunes Producer, the Mac-only software that you must use to upload your media and metadata to iTunes. It’s a very ordinary app indeed, clearly something with no developerwidth at Apple as it would be considered subpar as shareware if it were out there in the public eye. A website that helped labels create and manage the metadata and media before uploading it via iTunes Producer could also be very helpful.

And this is all just iTunes. Sure, they’re the biggest mainstream retailer but there are a lot of other online retailers to manage data in/out of. But iTunes would be a great start!

So before I go hire a developer and build a web application that does this, can I get a second opinion from other small record labels? Let me know what you think of the idea? Whether it might be helpful enough that you’d consider paying a small amount to access it? Whether there are other problems you face that this software could solve?

Thanks! 

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I learned of The National Living Treasures on the latest email from musical distributors par excellence, Vitamin. Their second album, Wide Music, escaped my attention, as had their first, but no longer: heck, these boys are good!

Go, listen to some luvverly track samples on their MySpace page including ‘Living Man’ which I would rank as highly as anything from Icecream Hands or Rheostatics, with some Apples in Stereo in the mix and perhaps even a soupçon of Brian Wilson and Todd Rundgren.

I kid you not when I say that you will enjoy it immensely. The plastic album is available directly through Vitamin but I can’t find it available on the interweb in digital format yet. An earlier EP is up on iTunes in the meantime.

If you’re lucky enough to be in Melbourne for Easter, you can catch their album launch at the Toff in Town on 24 March. 

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Easily the best thing about running a small indie record label is getting to hear demos from fresh new artists. There’s nothing better than receiving a new demo when I pop down to collect the mail from the post office box, because it’s always a chance to be one of the first people to discover an artist who’s going to be huge one day, to experience something you wouldn’t ordinarily listen to, to catch up with a good friend you haven’t heard from in a while, or sometimes, all of the above.

So big shout-out to Ted Jedlicki, hailing from the usually frozen wastes of Minnesota, who did an internship at Littoral Records back when we released James Cooper’s first album, and who’s sent me a demo from his band, Dynamite Flight.

The demo’s title is the best album title I’ve heard so far in 2008, a little wordy but fantastic:
“WE’RE GONNA ROCK YOUR SOCKS OFF AND MAKE YOU WALK HOME BAREFOOT” which might be something everybody says in Minneapolis, but I’d never heard it before. With energy and enthusiasm like that, how can Dynamite Flight fail to succeed?

Learn more about Ted, Dynamite Flight, and listen to some of their stuff at http://www.myspace.com/dynamiteflight

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