The Radio Edit: Let's Restore Music
The Radio Edit: Let's Restore Music
How patient artist development can bring music back to the heart of British culture.
Music is a central part of my identity. It also informs my “Britishness”. As an expat child, I observed that music was integral to what made us Brits. Coming back to the UK, it was a daily part of the conversation among the kids at school. Were you a mod? A soul boy? A jazz-funker? One of those uncool metal kids? I participated in the growth of the UK’s club scene and its penetration of British culture. I witnessed the birth of Britpop, perhaps the most overt connection of music to British identity, badged as it was by Tony Blair to “Cool Britannia”.
The current music biz narrative suggests that we are now in different times. There’s an issue breaking new artists, according to the moribund success metrics of the UK’s music charts. There’s evidence through our live industry that this is being felt more widely; not only that the decline in the number of music venues and the costs of touring are a blocker for new artists, but also that only the biggest and most popular shows can sell.
Trends exist and commerce persists: the music industry is making money, unlike previous periods of uncertainty. The issue is cultural. Mainstream music culture no longer exists - by which I mean a system of talent development, media promotion, distribution and consumption that serves a majority of the population. The part music plays in the national conversation has changed. The most vibrant music movements of the last fifty years have all been somewhat revolutionary in their sound, their business model, their culture. Do we miss the vitality, spontaneity and excitement that punk, rave and British black music brought to music, to culture, and to our sense of Britishness?
I try to answer these questions, here On Substack and over on Tunes and Tales, my medium blog; this topic is also a central pillar of my consulting practice. I’ve always an ear open to the conversation, so was interested to hear the discussion on Mark Sutherland and Mike Walsh’s excellent podcast series, The Money Trench. In separate interviews in the series, BPI’s Jo Twist, ex-Island boss Darcus Beese and seminal live agent Alex Hardee all touch on the UK’s challenges developing artists, some in hyperbolic terms, others more evasive. What most of the commentary lacks is solutions and/or perspective. So I was delighted to interview Nick Worthington on Medium, in an article entitled The Record Label recovery, Part III: Artist Development.
If you don’t know Nick, he’s been active on two fronts. First, he’s an A&R person who has signed and broken a number of idiosyncratic UK acts including The Streets, Kano and Basement Jaxx. Second, he’s an entrepreneur who has launched labels (Locked On, 679 Recordings), been in music retail as a partner in Pure Groove, helped found the Black Butter label and bring it into the Sony fold, as well as set up and sell a music publishing business. Nick continues to independently develop and manage artists.
He identifies environmental factors as causal in the “breaking artists” conundrum. A shift in consumption, from physical to digital formats, drove industry angst in the noughties. The angst we experience today is different as it’s the result of the process of breaking artists being completely upturned - “A lot of the accepted methods, timelines, budgets and metrics in artist development are no longer relevant”. He doesn’t think there’s an issue with A&R - the issue is the pressure A&R teams are under to deliver. “There’s still great A&R happening and brilliant artists being developed, but the environment people are working in doesn’t make it easy.”
Put simply, the old playbook doesn’t work and the new one isn’t evident yet. In any professional environment, this ambiguity in the methods required to deliver can get in the way of trust. This drives risk-aversion, even though, as Nick says, “when…the traditional model [is] not working, we need to be prepared to question everything.” It’s often at the point of maximum ambiguity that businesses redouble their efforts in familiar areas, rather than experiment with new ones, when in fact this is exactly the moment to foster change.
The most important change that Nick identifies is “the structures of how we do business, so artists have a better chance of success.” Underpinning artist development, there’s a theme in Nick’s interview of creative freedom backed by financial stability. He references his time at XL, when it was a small label deep in rave culture, but “the experience and stability of Beggars” helped forge success. He also cites his observations of restaurant group JKS, which similarly provides a stable corporate framework but enables individual restaurants to develop their own creative visions.
The collapse of the transactional-era artist development funnel (see graphic above) has de-powered a record label’s ability to prioritise artists for success. It’s self-evident, in this period of the record business, that artistic goals trump commercial ones in the process of artist development (Sony boss Rob Stringer references this in his recent Bloomberg interview). I’m reminded of the quality of “voice” that fiction writers talk about. Voice is the unique characteristic of the writing that makes it artistically distinctive. Given the centrality of the song to music, the concept applies. Where we used to be offered a limited set of artists that sounded the same, now we drown in a sea of choice and crave artists whose musical “voice” is different and unique. It takes time for those voices to develop, emerge, and attract fans.
This theme of patient artist development is in contrast to the pressure to deliver hit records and make things as big as possible that was a hallmark of the sales-based music business. As Nick says, “Consistent artist growth should be the aim, a hit is a bonus rather than the primary target.” This can be delivered by small teams driven by creative and artistic goals, like those who have worked on the success of artists like Central Cee, Dave, Jorga Smith and Fred Again: “the common thread seems to be flexible plans based around the artists’ unique creativity, delivered by a small team, who are all pulling in the same direction.”
Such an approach requires a different financial framework if you’re in the business of making money from the art of music. It can be paradoxical for those trained in accepted business doctrine to accept that the quality of artistic uniqueness has long term monetary value; that this value may not be realised until an undefined point in the future, and that the indicators for future success for artist A may well be different for artist B. That’s a conundrum music companies that trade publicly currently face, as they interact with investors unfamiliar or uncaring of the process of artist development. Increased investment into a diversified set of the types of small teams Nick sees as vehicles for success, may well allow them to build future repertoire at arms length, away from the pressure to deliver big quarterly results - which can be delivered by their valuable catalogues in any case. Perhaps this is the business case behind Universal’s now-complete acquisition of PIAS Group.
This focus on input, rather than output, might also help the UK to get its global mojo back. Nick refers to an interview with Netflix’ Ted Sarandos that he read, where Sarandos “was talking about their programming strategy being ‘local’ rather than global and their global hits coming from ‘local’ programmes like Squid Game and Baby Reindeer.” Nick quotes Sarandos as saying, “people can smell it if you try to manufacture something to be global.”
The UK’s had the privileged position of delivering English-language music to a global market trained to consume it, but now experiences a correction as local-language music becomes more popular. On both the podcasts I’ve referenced and in conversation this is dismissed as “we’ve gone backward to being like Belgium”. Rather than beating up poor old Belgium, maybe we should accept where we are and look to their music culture for inspiration? Belgium’s a small country with a bilingual population and a distinctive music culture. Jacques Brel, Johnny Holliday (despite claims to be French). Plastic Bertrand. Front 242. R&S Records. Soulwax. Technotronic. 2 Unlimited, Junior Jack & Kid Creme. More recently, music from the diaspora cultures of the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as the Maghreb. As no one’s fancied Belgium (permanently slagged off - “all chocolate and lace”) - it’s got on with things out of the limelight and built a musical scene that has thrived over many decades.
It’d be pointless for the Belgians to chase global hits. They had a thriving techno scene, though - and put out monster tunes like Joey Beltram’s Energy Flash , Jaydee’s Plastic Dreams and the hoover-rave classic, Human Resource’s Dominator. This laid the foundation for later hits from 2Unlimited and Technotronic among others, which started life on the dancefloor but became huge hits that live on through streaming. Heard in specific conditions, Dominator is certainly a bit like watching an episode of Baby Reindeer.
It’s not for anyone to dictate what British culture should or shouldn't be, but it is surely poorer without music occupying a central space. We need to put creativity and art back in the middle of what we wish to be achieved; give musicians the space to make great music, to develop their art and to grow. Our job as the an industry is to foster the environment for that and to create the right financial and legal framework to allow the best art to emerge in a way that allows investments in it to be successful.
Let’s invest in A&R and patient artist development; let’s encourage independent music companies to be born, and invest in them. Let’s restore music and make it thrive in British culture. This is something everyone - labels, publishers, distributors, trade bodies, government - should be pulling together to achieve.
As Nick says, “To lose this thriving part of the country’s economy would be devastating.”