Listening to last night’s edition of ‘Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone’ on BBC Radio 6 Music I received a grim reminder of how the music business is going in Britain and it isn’t going well. Last week, Steve Lamacq’s tea time show mades a series of visits to venues as part of its contribution to Independent Venue Week, where we learned the struggle independent venues are struggling not just to prosper but to survive. Maconie played a great track by one of my favourite bands, the High Llamas, the title track of Here Come The Rattling Trees. Anyway, Sean O’Hagan’s band can’t even get a gig at the moment. And why? No one is streaming, let along buying their records.
I am not Luddite enough to pretend that streaming is not the present or the future when it comes to music. While I still buy hard copies of records, when I can from direct from the artist so they get more of the money, I recognise that I am in a small minority. The problem with streaming music is that the music makers get paid a pittance for their work. That needs to be addressed by increasing the cost of streaming and buy encouraging people to buy the music, or other merchandise, from the artist concerned. The problem for the High Llamas, and doubtless that for many other artists, is that when they go to book them they will look at streaming history and if there are few Streams or records sold, artists don’t tend to get booked at all. At a time when musicians can only make serious money from live shows, it must be heartbreaking to make new music and then see no one listening to and buying it, denying the artists the ability to earn a living playing gigs.
Together with the difficulties in running independent venues, with the groaning costs of VAT acting as a venue killer, as well as inflation, you can see a grim future for musicians who are not near the top of the food chain.
Music still brings in vast income to the country and it would be nice if the government at least acknowledged that in terms of direct help and by making it easier for British acts to tour EU countries, which is becoming next to impossible for all but the very top acts.
This stuff won’t affect the Ed Sheerans of this world but it will in all likelihood the next generation of stars who will find the ladder has been kicked away from them. He seems a very nice chap, that Ed, but if he was all that was left to listen to I’d rather go deaf.
