TWE, Alan McGee and Tim Burgess

In a scenario where you have Alan McGee, former boss of Creation Records and Tim Burgess of The Charlatans, plus around 60 of the assembled ‘talent’ at TWE it would seem to be a pretty could forum to open dialogue between experience and those seeking advice. After, all this is a ‘conversation’ event.

But, for me, this was a missed opportunity.  Let’s face it, there’s a lot to talk about where and how the media industry, particularly recording artists, is going and in what kind of shape it could be in, in the future.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

But, in the gaps there were some interesting comments, particularly from Alan McGee. I liked his reference to the music industry now being “easy, but hard”. Easy because almost anyone can build themselves a presence on the web using a site like MySpace. The great success of MySpace has been down to their simplifying the creation of web pages for everyone and then latterly forming a considerable niche as the ‘place to be’ for musical types.

But because it is easy, it is hard. Because anyone can do it, it means there are millions of bands on MySpace, millions of bands with a presence of sorts and millions of bands looking for the attention of a limited number of A&R guys. The stories of bands making it without the traditional A&R approach are still, I would argue, few and far between and the mega-successful new bands are still coming through the traditional methods.

So, the point is that it’s now harder to get the attention of the people who still make the market, harder to get airtime and harder to make it to the ranks of the mega-successful.

Once you are successful though, the industry is changing - or at least the dynamics of the power structure are changing. McGee points out that once a band is famous, why does it need a record company? Tim Burgess is sat next to him as he’s saying this, but didn’t extend the point, unfortunately, when his own band - the Charlatans - has recently made their latest album available as a free download. Radiohead did the same and this practice is gaining momentum.

McGee is right though, it’s OK to do this once you are famous as the buying public will lap it up and you have opportunities to generate revenue elsewhere. When you’re an upcoming band in a thriving musical city like Manchester, it’s harder to stand out from the crowd, especially when that crowd has become so much bigger.

Will the changes that the established bands like Radiohead and The Charlatans are forging trickle down to the grass roots and on the way change how bans become popular? Is there a different model to the industry than we see now, or is it so embedded and intertwined amongst A&R, promoters, record labels, radio playlists and TV pluggers as to be an even more difficult struggle for the bands trying to make it?

That’s more questions than I intended to end this post with, but I suppose what I’m really questioning is whether all the focus on social media in the music industry, all the activity and all the perceived visibility for budding bands is actually making it harder to succeed than we’ve seen in recent history.

To return to the focus of this session. It would have been fantastic to hear Tim Burgess comments on this and even better to have heard from the assembled audience who, let’s face it, will likely never get the chance to be in the same room as these guys again.

-pc.