Well we certainly got people’s attention with our formal complaint to the BBC Trust about the impact of BBC Introducing. Unfortunately the serious thought behind the story appears to have been somewhat lost on those Twitterers and Guardian respondents who were critical of us. They mostly thought I was after a cheap headline: what I actually wanted was a rational debate, about public/private balance, commercial viability, access to opportunity and ethics. If we, as a nation, could get that balance right, it would be brilliant for the BBC, for the country as a whole and above all for our musicians. I’ll explain.
Before I do, here’s some ‘introducing’ of my own. I’m the last person you’d expect to criticise the BBC. Before I founded amazing, I worked in new media and broadcasting, much of the latter at the BBC. I was once, so the Head of Appointments told me, the youngest-ever BBC Producer. Before I joined as a General Trainee, I read the Annan report from cover to cover. (If you don’t know what that is – lucky you). For a long and retrospectively rather scary period, I wanted to run the BBC. I still have Reithianism engraved on my heart and sometimes wake up – 22 years after I left, fed up with the internal politics – surprised I don’t work there any more. Mostly, I still love it. I recently wrote to The Times defending the BBC, describing it as ‘one of the glories of Britain’. I meant that, because it’s true. But even a global icon needs a good slapping from time to time, especially when we own it. This fact is sometimes lost on those within the BBC, who look on external criticism as an infinitely curious but rather distasteful distraction, like a Victorian cleric stepping over an improbably-shaped turd.
So I know a bit about the BBC. Ditto music. I’ve been an intermittently working musician for almost forty years. I was eleven when first paid to play; my last gig, as timpanist with one of the UK’s leading professional orchestras, was a fortnight ago. In between, I’ve humped my share of bass bins from clapped-out vans, sat wondering if I’d survive a violent gig with my drums intact, been scared at the arrival of tinnitus, fallen asleep in damp, cheap studios, done umpteen broadcasts, appeared on a pile of rubbish records and played everywhere from The Marquee Club to the Royal Festival Hall. (If you’re interested, the high and low points were ‘Friday Night is Music Night’ and accompanying the strippers in a northern working men’s club. I’ll let you work out which was which). Realising, like millions before, that I couldn’t make a full-time living out of it, I’ve also been a radio DJ, a Producer of Channel 4 music programmes and a sound engineer. I’ve seen a bit of the music industry. Which means, I’ve seen musicians being ripped off. (I started amazing in an attempt to stop that).
Now let’s deal with some chronology. We launched amazingtunes.com in 2005, two years before BBC Introducing. They launched their upload service this February. We did it first. Amazing Radio launched on June 1st 2009, the world’s first radio station playing 100% unsigned music. John Peel started on Radio 1 forty-two years earlier. Hmm. Strange to tell, I wasn’t really suggesting we were the first people to play unsigned music on national radio. And, having spent many happy hours as a student working in local radio, I remember how the atmosphere changed (literally, too) on Monday nights, when the rather more bearded presenters of the local music programme came in.
So the BBC spokesperson’s straight-bat response to our complaint was valid and correct: the BBC has a long and honourable tradition of supporting new music, one rooted in locality and occasionally aired nationally. It should continue. As G K Chesterton said, ‘nothing is real, that is not local’.
But that’s not the issue. There’s a difference between a cassette in a jiffy bag and BBC Introducing. In the past, the BBC’s unsigned activities were a tiny dot in a healthy musical ecology. The British music industry was one of the vibrant successes of our creative economy, generating millions in GDP, even making the odd musician rich, after the pampered record company Execs of course. Peel & Co. were surrounded by a privately-owned A&R army, waiting to pick up the lucky few; there was a path, with a destination, somewhere for your manky cassette to go. ‘A deal’ with a major would pay the exorbitant cost of recording, pressing, distributing and marketing your precious record. (They took all the profit in the process, of course).
Today, everything has changed. You don’t need an advance to record exceptional music. You don’t need a pressing plant. Viral marketing is cheaper, faster and more honest than any paid-for promotional campaign. The musical world has shifted on its axis, and the shockwaves have destroyed the traditional music industry. Its slow death was largely self-inflicted, of course, brought on by a toxic combination of greed and laziness, boiled up by the new technology. While the liggers partied, oblivious to the onward march of digits, the customers decamped elsewhere. Now, the EMIs of this world are focusing on their ‘long tail’, squeezing every last penny from the back catalogue. They’ve always been more into the ‘business’ than the ‘music’. Now, they’re morphing into antique dealers.
This is a bit of a shame for the UK. In the good times, our music business was a world leader. Not any more. Our creative industries may be the fastest-growing part of the economy, but for those mega music corporations with their impossibly-beautiful employees and their preposterous reception areas, the only way is down. The smart ones realise this. Talk for five minutes to anyone with music biz experience and a brain and they’ll say ‘we’re all looking for the answer’ ten times. They have no idea what it will be, of course – they’re too stuck in the old world. You can’t think out of the box when you’re still asleep in it, finding what’s left of it really rather warm. But the answer is obvious enough: it’ll come from some combination of downloads, mobile delivery, democratisation and social networking. When someone gets it right, it’ll be amazing.
It might even be amazing. I genuinely think we could be one of the successors to the old system. The elements are all in place. We’ve had the brand, the technology and above all the morality for some time. The ethics are the most important bit – we give 70% of revenue to artists, forever overturning the besetting sin of the old music industry (it ripped off the musicians) while removing the disgraceful moral evasion that made some deranged people think it somehow permissible to rip off music. As we’ve shown, you don’t steal from the artist whose tune you just fell in love with, when you know they need – and will get – your money.
What we were lacking, until recently, was traction. Brand presence. A USP. So we emptied all our piggy banks, tapped up our long-suffering investors and launched Amazing Radio. I very much doubt the experience of funding it in the teeth of a recession has lengthened my life.
The reaction was astounding. People get it. They love the variety, they understand the concept, they like the music: and then they buy it. With the exception of a few bloggers yesterday, they want it to succeed. If it does, thousands of musicians will make more money than we will from their music. No exceptions.
I’m the same age as Simon Cowell. There the similarity ends. We‘re not doing this to get rich quick. We get a tiny amount of cash per download. We’ll only make money if the whole thing gets enormous – at which point, thousands of amazing musicians will have made anything from a few quid, to a good living, to a small fortune. If it does work, we’ll also create more employment, in a part of the world a bit lacking in job opportunities. (Cheryl Cole isn’t the first to leave the north-east in search of work). And we’ll play a part in ensuring there’s a British, private sector component in the new global music business, which will be good for GDP and tax revenues. I do think schools and hospitals are better than the alternative, don’t you?
Then along comes the BBC, with its publicly-funded hobnail boots. Introducing is functionally identical to a large part of what we’re doing, but lacks the ultimate destination; it leads to airtime – and nothing else. This was understandable in Peel’s jiffy-bag day, when the record labels would sign up his best acts. Now, in Digitland, with the music industry dying and deserting new releases, it’s criminal – a bridge to a destination that has sunk. Worse, it’s growing. The BBC loves expanding as nature abhors a vacuum. Launched initially as a tool for local radio, Introducing is now a whole new BBC service, a pan-BBC megalith, covering local and network radio, TV, even Glastonbury. They should change its name to BBC Self-aggrandising. A greater proportion of the BBC’s gargantuan output now plays new music than ever before – Radio 2, anyone? - returning nothing to the artists except a PRS fee. (Which, because PRS doesn’t do detail and can’t work computers, will probably go to Paul McCartney. But that’s another story). In the process, Introducing attacks our USP, undermining the incentive for musicians to sign up to amazing and its myriad private sector competitors. If this continues, we’ll end up with a vibrant, publicly-owned BBC: and no music industry.
Not that they realise, of course. I talked to a senior BBC bod yesterday at a radio conference. He was nice and smart and really seemed to want to understand my issue. But he just didn’t get it, he couldn’t see the problem (which is exactly why there is one). I could see his difficulty. Inside the laager, with utter certainty you’ll get paid on the 15th of each month and a nice final salary pension to look forward to, you can’t begin to comprehend how, in the digital age, what you do could, accidentally, unintentionally, haphazardly maybe, deprive others of a living – people working in the real economy, struggling to invent something new, create employment and get their businesses off the ground. He didn’t see his associated double-think either. I asked him why they built their own upload tool when we and MySpace and others already had, why they always thought they should do it all themselves, why they couldn’t work in partnership with the private companies serving unsigned bands and trying to reinvent the music industry. He said they weren’t allowed to; they couldn’t partner with the private sector. He couldn’t see the irony: for all its life, the BBC has worked with private record companies, promoting their artists, swallowing their marketing tactics, paying for the privilege of promoting their releases. Now, they don’t think they should work with what’s replacing them?
Not that any of this is new, of course. BBC 7 did it to One Word. BBC Jam nearly did it to the UK’s e-learning businesses. They planned to do it to regional newspapers with their online news plans. Now they’re doing it to the incipient new music business – the one the British economy, thousands of musicians, and millions of fans need to be created, to grow and to succeed. Each time, well-meaning BBC employees are motivated by a genuine desire to serve their audience by doing more and more stuff. They never consider the impact on anyone else. When we complain, they pause, consider our comments, reject them, then carry on regardless – thus failing in their public service remit to serve the whole community, or engage in genuine debate.
When I was in the BBC, I once made a film with a pig farmer. He described how a corpulent sow would sometimes roll over and crush her little piggies to death. It’s not the sow’s fault, he said. She doesn’t know they’re there. She doesn’t realise she’s doing any harm.
Paul Campbell
amazing founder
© The Amazing Media Group 2009
