alt-rock-confessions

[alt-rock-confessions]

I'm a very logical, no-nonsense pragmatic and practical person but I am also the sort of person that took their best mate on the Westway in London just because For Tomorrow has the line 'we're lost on the Westway', I contain multitudes

[alt-rock-confessions]

Not sure if this is the right blog for this, but the magazine was key to the 2000s “indie sleaze” scene (New York indie scene) so here goes, but learning that the founder of Vice later became the founder of the Proud Boys shook me so much, like I can’t look back on the early “edgy” Vice stuff the same way anymore

I think I saw the same post this week and apparently he was always on the brink of some really awful conservatism but it was dismissed as ‘challenging humour’ at the time so yeah.

Vice was more than just one guy and he’s obviously not associated with the media company/website anymore, but I understand feeling awkward about looking back on old articles because the founders and the team around them set the tone for what a media company or magazine sounds like, and clearly Gavin McInness influenced Vice’s voice, even just as one of three cofounders.

Honestly, I’m a bit younger than the Vice era so I don’t have example articles off the top of my head I can point to to demonstrate their tone from the 00s, but others who follow this blog might. Here’s the article about the guy, from the CBC though.

[alt-rock-confessions]

anytime a song has a good bassline i immediately come

[alt-rock-confessions]

The next person to yap about Eddie Vedder hanging from the rafters and complaining that modern bands will never be like their beloved 90s grunge bands is receiving 1) a chappal to the face 2) this picture of Gurriers at SXSW from last week

Gurriers are fucking awesome, believe you me.

Brilliant Dublin heavy/punk band

[alt-rock-confessions]

Rolling Stone just summarised exactly what I’ve been saying here all week in a recent piece about the pushback on Doechii:

Doechii’s buzz has made her the belle of Paris Fashion Week, where she made her runway debut for DSquared2 and had several other notable appearances. And seemingly straight off the plane, she recently took the stage with Lauryn Hill at Miami’s Jazz in the Garden festival. Those upset that she’s forging such powerful connections don’t seem to realize that it’s what’s historically happened in the music industry. Labels heavily invest in acts they believe in, and powerful brands partner with them while legendary acts take notice of them. In recent years, we’ve become so used to seeing labels deprioritize marketing that a successful campaign feels like a nefarious agenda instead of successfully performing its job function. It’s fine to be annoyed that the label is trying to make you like something. But marketing isn’t some covert strategy. And it doesn’t feel fair to transfer that annoyance to a talented act. 

“Industry plant” is one of those buzzwords that’s never had a universally agreed-upon meaning. It may fit for an artist who popped up out of nowhere while neglecting to mention having a powerful family member in the industry. But it doesn’t fit the profile of Doechii, a 10-year veteran who delivered a polished, adventurous project and paired it with fun music videos and creative direction. She’s a true definition of the “overnight star” being a decade in the making, and she worked hard to warrant the marketing push she’s received. 

[T]he armchair A&Ring has reached a phase of outsmarting itself, where we’re mad at her because her label invested in her — and she met the moment. 

People need to stop confusing having money with being an industry plant, you’re babbling words you don’t know the meaning to.

You know what an industry plant is? An industry plant is someone who the industry plucks out and decides to fashion into music careerists. It’s when Simon Cowell puts together a boy band and has their entire image made up for them. It’s when they don’t have an artistic career of their own: every aspect of their career is planned out for them. It’s labels taking a child and saying, ‘kid, we’re gonna make you a star.’

You know what an ‘industry plant’ moment is? A 360 ‘all-rights’ record deal, where the label controls not only print, publishing and distribution of your music, but also what endorsements and sponsorships you will do outside of your music career. When that is signed at the start of your career, that’s industry placement. The word ‘industry plant’ is meaningless.

Having money to buy your instruments, having money to go to music school, having money to sustain a career gigging underground for 3 years before you get discovered? That is not being an industry plant. Getting signed to a record label after being discovered? That’s not being an industry plant.

Being born middle class? You may have your problems with it, but it’s not being an industry plant.

Personally I think we waste time trying to eat slightly more well off kids— focus on the rich kids. There’s not enough money in music for you to be squabbling over how someone with $10,000 is making a music career. I say this in the most practical manner possible: preventing middle class kids from making music is not going to create more grassroots venues. Boycotting middle class musicians will not create more arts grants and youth clubs. Cutting middle class acts, as much as this will surprise you, is not going to mean that more working class bands get support slots that will change their careers. That requires a cultural change. Oasis could’ve made the life and career of any smaller band they’d chosen to open for them. They were given those opportunities at the start of their career. They chose not to do the same for the next generation of working class bands. That decision is not impacted by the availability of working class musicians or the unavailability of middle class ones, that is a culture change. Focus on changing the conversation, redirect the unwanted attention to those that hold the purse strings.

There are execs that run the music industry that are raking in billions. Why is (Spotify CEO) Daniel Ek’s net worth higher than Paul McCartney’s, or all the Beatles (+ estates) put together? Why is one Daniel Ek richer than Oasis? Who’s done more for music? (And who has instead destroyed the industry from the inside so that no musician can ever hope to comfortably live off their music careers?)

Spotify parades on the BRIT awards red carpet going ‘omg, we love the vibes! ✨’ without ever having done any of the work to get those artists up there. I refer you to Myles Smith’s beautiful acceptance speech at the BRITs. ‘You can’t just celebrate success. You have to protect the foundations that make it.’

’Industry plant’, when it is not being used solely to discredit women in music, is not a word that is helpful in actually creating meaningful change in the music industry. All it does is drive wedges between musicians, fans and music industry workers behind the scenes—producers, light and sound technicians, venue staff, road crew, so many more—who are otherwise united in understanding that the problem isn’t that there is no money in music. The problem is that there is no money in grassroots music, because money that used to be put back into the music industry as an investment into the future stars that will one day sell out the big stadiums, top the music charts (/generate billions of streams) and generate those billions in the economy, has simply stopped in favour of another cheque bonus to a Lucian Grainge or a Daniel Ek. Anyone who works in the music industry or is vaguely familiar with its workings knows this.

And so it is in the best interest those that run the industry to create nonexistent divides between the kinds of musicians in the scene: one who will never again have the resources to reach the top and so can be discarded with no consequences by the industry (see: Spotify deciding that any artist with less than a thousand streams a month would not get paid at all. Not only is this work-for-free not being prosecuted, it is being embraced by other streaming companies as well), and the other who are now being eaten by their own for having barely a fraction of the wealth that DOES exist in music but will never reach the people that keep the music industry ticking over.

Put money into the underground. Make it easier for kids to take up music from the very beginning. Ezra Collective stood up on one of the largest platforms you can have in UK music and advocated for youth centres and music clubs.

You really want to tackle industry plants? Combat them by giving everyday musicians the resources to help them reach the top.

Support rising independent music. Voice your support for levies that will give back a portion of larger venues’ revenues to grassroots venues. Buy music if you can, rather than just streaming it. It goes a much further way than the $0.003 a stream gets.

[alt-rock-confessions]

this might be niche but Conor Curley from Fontaines D.C. when he used to wear his glasses on stage was so hot. Like a reversal of the ‘takes off glasses and becomes hot’ trope. I wish he’d wear them again

Good news is you’ll still sometimes see him rock those shades on stage these days!

[alt-rock-confessions]

If some person asked an AI to make them a vocal that sounded like Kate Bush and then thought they were good musicians because some data scraper poorly reproduced some Kate Bush song it was once trained on, I’d be livid

in light of the recent silent album that Kate Bush and a 1000+ UK musicians were a part of, in protest of the UK government’s plan to loosen copyright restrictions on recorded music so that AI companies can train their models on them.

https://www.isthiswhatwewant.com/

“The album consists of recordings of empty studios and performance spaces, representing the impact we expect the government’s proposals would have on musicians’ livelihoods.”

[alt-rock-confessions]

Somehow, unpacking the inner workings of the music industry has become the focus of the month of this blog— which is fair enough, I suppose; for the last 40 years, alternative artists (and major label ‘indie’ bands, which would be an oxymoron if you thought about the fact that ‘indie’ stood for independent rather than a specific sound) have been conscious of their ‘indie cred’, which is why Universal Music has had my rundown campus radio station’s address on file and had sent us advance copies of music by their alternative artists since the 1970s and 80s.

Back when ‘college rock’ was the emerging buzzword in underground music, everyone wanted to seem like they were being organically picked up by listeners of independent and college radio stations, to maintain their indie cred before they inevitably got that commercial radio airplay. It was a small thing shaping their image.

Today, college radio is not consequential enough for most non-indie labels to notice us and as us to their emailing lists for mass EPK send-outs (that’s an electronic presskit, usually access to the music and a blurb about the music and artist and why you should play it). But indie cred still seems to be all the rage: see accusations of industry plants.

Ellie Dixon, a British indie pop musician did a little rundown of what the accusations usually mean and came to the conclusion that it’s fairly pointless to call someone an industry plant: you can’t do music without money. Unless you’re rich and can fund your hobby, you need to find a financial backer. That’s all a label is, albeit with more strings attached. Getting signed by a label is not being an industry plant, it’s a normal progression for an artist.

And Ellie says, having taken a look at who usually is at the receiving end of ‘industry plant’ accusations— can you guess?

Yup, it’s all the usual suspects! Women! Queer artists! Musicians of colour! Folks with nonstandard gender presentations and identities! You could’ve guessed that if I’d given you two minutes. Ellie says, a lot of people are still jarred to see musicians who haven’t traditionally been heard, and whose music might sound different to you from the standard stuff you’re used to the white lads playing and talking about, doing well. It’s unfamiliar to you. So your gut reaction is to say, ‘What shit Is this? How did this ever make it in the music industry! I don’t like it because it’s not what I’m used to. Must be an industry plant.’

And so artists who have been slogging away for years before getting their break also have to deal with hordes of people with a limited palette for music and themes questioning their success every step of the way.

So do yourself a favour and ditch the term. You need money to make it in the music industry. If someone is able to do it despite the odds, I salute them.

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A post shared by Ellie Dixon (@elliedixonmusic)

People need to stop confusing having money with being an industry plant, you’re babbling words you don’t know the meaning to.

You know what an industry plant is? An industry plant is someone who the industry plucks out and decides to fashion into music careerists. It’s when Simon Cowell puts together a boy band and has their entire image made up for them. It’s when they don’t have an artistic career of their own: every aspect of their career is planned out for them. It’s labels taking a child and saying, ‘kid, we’re gonna make you a star.’

You know what an ‘industry plant’ moment is? A 360 ‘all-rights’ record deal, where the label controls not only print, publishing and distribution of your music, but also what endorsements and sponsorships you will do outside of your music career. When that is signed at the start of your career, that’s industry placement. The word ‘industry plant’ is meaningless.

Having money to buy your instruments, having money to go to music school, having money to sustain a career gigging underground for 3 years before you get discovered? That is not being an industry plant. Getting signed to a record label after being discovered? That’s not being an industry plant.

Being born middle class? You may have your problems with it, but it’s not being an industry plant.

Personally I think we waste time trying to eat slightly more well off kids— focus on the rich kids. There’s not enough money in music for you to be squabbling over how someone with $10,000 is making a music career. I say this in the most practical manner possible: preventing middle class kids from making music is not going to create more grassroots venues. Boycotting middle class musicians will not create more arts grants and youth clubs. Cutting middle class acts, as much as this will surprise you, is not going to mean that more working class bands get support slots that will change their careers. That requires a cultural change. Oasis could’ve made the life and career of any smaller band they’d chosen to open for them. They were given those opportunities at the start of their career. They chose not to do the same for the next generation of working class bands. That decision is not impacted by the availability of working class musicians or the unavailability of middle class ones, that is a culture change. Focus on changing the conversation, redirect the unwanted attention to those that hold the purse strings.

There are execs that run the music industry that are raking in billions. Why is (Spotify CEO) Daniel Ek’s net worth higher than Paul McCartney’s, or all the Beatles (+ estates) put together? Why is one Daniel Ek richer than Oasis? Who’s done more for music? (And who has instead destroyed the industry from the inside so that no musician can ever hope to comfortably live off their music careers?)

Spotify parades on the BRIT awards red carpet going ‘omg, we love the vibes! ✨’ without ever having done any of the work to get those artists up there. I refer you to Myles Smith’s beautiful acceptance speech at the BRITs. ‘You can’t just celebrate success. You have to protect the foundations that make it.’

’Industry plant’, when it is not being used solely to discredit women in music, is not a word that is helpful in actually creating meaningful change in the music industry. All it does is drive wedges between musicians, fans and music industry workers behind the scenes—producers, light and sound technicians, venue staff, road crew, so many more—who are otherwise united in understanding that the problem isn’t that there is no money in music. The problem is that there is no money in grassroots music, because money that used to be put back into the music industry as an investment into the future stars that will one day sell out the big stadiums, top the music charts (/generate billions of streams) and generate those billions in the economy, has simply stopped in favour of another cheque bonus to a Lucian Grainge or a Daniel Ek. Anyone who works in the music industry or is vaguely familiar with its workings knows this.

And so it is in the best interest those that run the industry to create nonexistent divides between the kinds of musicians in the scene: one who will never again have the resources to reach the top and so can be discarded with no consequences by the industry (see: Spotify deciding that any artist with less than a thousand streams a month would not get paid at all. Not only is this work-for-free not being prosecuted, it is being embraced by other streaming companies as well), and the other who are now being eaten by their own for having barely a fraction of the wealth that DOES exist in music but will never reach the people that keep the music industry ticking over.

Put money into the underground. Make it easier for kids to take up music from the very beginning. Ezra Collective stood up on one of the largest platforms you can have in UK music and advocated for youth centres and music clubs.

You really want to tackle industry plants? Combat them by giving everyday musicians the resources to help them reach the top.

Support rising independent music. Voice your support for levies that will give back a portion of larger venues’ revenues to grassroots venues. Buy music if you can, rather than just streaming it. It goes a much further way than the $0.003 a stream gets.

[alt-rock-confessions]

What's up with Britain in the 2000's launching rock bands' careers with rodents as vocalists/guitarists?

[alt-rock-confessions]

Oh my god so you don't like Sabrina Carpenter. Should we give you music listener of the year award? Should we tell Radiohead

[alt-rock-confessions]

I will never date anyone. I will only think about jangle pop

[alt-rock-confessions]

How long really is the “I like Muse because they aren’t always singing about love and write really interesting songs” -> “I’m asexual aren’t I?” pipeline?

[alt-rock-confessions]

People need to stop confusing having money with being an industry plant, you’re babbling words you don’t know the meaning to.

You know what an industry plant is? An industry plant is someone who the industry plucks out and decides to fashion into music careerists. It’s when Simon Cowell puts together a boy band and has their entire image made up for them. It’s when they don’t have an artistic career of their own: every aspect of their career is planned out for them. It’s labels taking a child and saying, ‘kid, we’re gonna make you a star.’

You know what an ‘industry plant’ moment is? A 360 ‘all-rights’ record deal, where the label controls not only print, publishing and distribution of your music, but also what endorsements and sponsorships you will do outside of your music career. When that is signed at the start of your career, that’s industry placement. The word ‘industry plant’ is meaningless.

Having money to buy your instruments, having money to go to music school, having money to sustain a career gigging underground for 3 years before you get discovered? That is not being an industry plant. Getting signed to a record label after being discovered? That’s not being an industry plant.

Being born middle class? You may have your problems with it, but it’s not being an industry plant.

Personally I think we waste time trying to eat slightly more well off kids— focus on the rich kids. There’s not enough money in music for you to be squabbling over how someone with $10,000 is making a music career. I say this in the most practical manner possible: preventing middle class kids from making music is not going to create more grassroots venues. Boycotting middle class musicians will not create more arts grants and youth clubs. Cutting middle class acts, as much as this will surprise you, is not going to mean that more working class bands get support slots that will change their careers. That requires a cultural change. Oasis could’ve made the life and career of any smaller band they’d chosen to open for them. They were given those opportunities at the start of their career. They chose not to do the same for the next generation of working class bands. That decision is not impacted by the availability of working class musicians or the unavailability of middle class ones, that is a culture change. Focus on changing the conversation, redirect the unwanted attention to those that hold the purse strings.

There are execs that run the music industry that are raking in billions. Why is (Spotify CEO) Daniel Ek’s net worth higher than Paul McCartney’s, or all the Beatles (+ estates) put together? Why is one Daniel Ek richer than Oasis? Who’s done more for music? (And who has instead destroyed the industry from the inside so that no musician can ever hope to comfortably live off their music careers?)

Spotify parades on the BRIT awards red carpet going ‘omg, we love the vibes! ✨’ without ever having done any of the work to get those artists up there. I refer you to Myles Smith’s beautiful acceptance speech at the BRITs. ‘You can’t just celebrate success. You have to protect the foundations that make it.’

’Industry plant’, when it is not being used solely to discredit women in music, is not a word that is helpful in actually creating meaningful change in the music industry. All it does is drive wedges between musicians, fans and music industry workers behind the scenes—producers, light and sound technicians, venue staff, road crew, so many more—who are otherwise united in understanding that the problem isn’t that there is no money in music. The problem is that there is no money in grassroots music, because money that used to be put back into the music industry as an investment into the future stars that will one day sell out the big stadiums, top the music charts (/generate billions of streams) and generate those billions in the economy, has simply stopped in favour of another cheque bonus to a Lucian Grainge or a Daniel Ek. Anyone who works in the music industry or is vaguely familiar with its workings knows this.

And so it is in the best interest those that run the industry to create nonexistent divides between the kinds of musicians in the scene: one who will never again have the resources to reach the top and so can be discarded with no consequences by the industry (see: Spotify deciding that any artist with less than a thousand streams a month would not get paid at all. Not only is this work-for-free not being prosecuted, it is being embraced by other streaming companies as well), and the other who are now being eaten by their own for having barely a fraction of the wealth that DOES exist in music but will never reach the people that keep the music industry ticking over.

Put money into the underground. Make it easier for kids to take up music from the very beginning. Ezra Collective stood up on one of the largest platforms you can have in UK music and advocated for youth centres and music clubs.

You really want to tackle industry plants? Combat them by giving everyday musicians the resources to help them reach the top.

Support rising independent music. Voice your support for levies that will give back a portion of larger venues’ revenues to grassroots venues. Buy music if you can, rather than just streaming it. It goes a much further way than the $0.003 a stream gets.

[alt-rock-confessions]

sitting in music theory class doing classical harmony exercises trying to explain that this is what got me into music:

[alt-rock-confessions]

The weirdly life affirming thing about fandom and some of the adoration that comes with it, particularly as pertains to real people, is that fans will love all the parts of you. That what is deemed ‘marketable’ by the press release and everything else they left out. If you come from something, fans will keep it alive. A Sam Fender fan away in Nebraska, USA will learn the Geordie dialect to accurately write Sam Fender x reader fanfic. They will keep alive a dialect declining even in Newcastle. As long as someone knows it, it lives on. The more people into it, the more beloved it becomes; it has a resurgence, it carries on. A Kneecap fan in Indonesia whose third language is English decides Irish Gaeilge can be their fourth. The Eurovision fans decided they can learn all of Finnish after being drawn to one song about piña coladas (and the super endearing Käärijä!)

Fandom is so much more than some base lowly shit to be embarrassed about that people like to reduce it to. It’s a powerful mode of culture. It’s so much more than about writing ‘your silly little stories about your pathetic men’; fandom is the reason American Blur fans flew thousands of miles overseas to be at Wembley last summer. Fandom is checking your IG stories after that gig and seeing that other well-loved musicians also have the same story as you because they were at that gig too. It is months later hearing Grian Chatten from Fontaines D.C. say that part of their new song was inspired by going to that Wembley show, and knowing exactly what he meant by that.

It is about shared cultural moments, it’s about the realisation that nothing is ever strictly in the past, and that we are sharing and creating culture in the now. I don’t know where I’m going with this, I was just struck by the connection between culture and pop culture. Don’t let people tell you they’re different worlds, I suppose

[alt-rock-confessions]

Thom bot-approved, apparently!

The tired old "Muse and Coldplay are just Radiohead ripoffs" discourse gets funnier and funnier for me as the years pass. not only are both bands still active, but they're also taking more actual risks than Radiohead. I can't picture Thom Yorke dabbling in metal or collab-ing with BTS

I had this one cued to go out mid week but fuck it, it’s relevant now after the Smashing Pumpkins thing.

With how often they need to say it, you’d think Radiohead fans needed to be seen being stereotypically cool at all times or the sunglasses covering their eyes would explode

…

Okay, but real answer? They’re all just vastly different bands. It was pretty nonsensical to compare them in the first place.

Radiohead have gone on to experiment in post rock areas, Muse have gone searching for the space between genres, blending them effortlessly and regularly reinventing themselves. And Coldplay tbh push the boundaries of pop music. These are three bands with very different goals in terms of what they want from their music. The reason all 3 are still here is testament to the fact that they’ve still got something to say.

The press loves a headline, and some 45 year olds need to pretend they’ve ‘still got’ the edge of their teenage selves because it’s either that or gracefully embracing middle age. What will you do.

[alt-rock-confessions]

Sam Fender has hit out at the current state of the music industry, describing it as “rigged” with “90 per cent kids who are privately educated”.

Speaking in a new interview with The Sunday Times the singer-songwriter also said he feels guilty that his life has changed after making it in the music industry despite being from a working class background in North Shields while his friends still struggle “on the bones of their arse”.

He said: “The music industry is 80 per cent, 90 per cent kids who are privately educated. A kid from where I’m from can’t afford to tour, so there are probably thousands writing songs that are ten times better than mine, poignant lyrics about the country, but they will not be seen because it’s rigged.”

Referring to the song from ‘TV Dinner’ from his latest album ‘People Watching‘ which was released on Friday (February 21), he also criticised the industry for “building” artists up “to knock ’em down.”

He said: “It was wild. I wrote that, then Liam Payne died. You think of the amount of times he was getting dragged through the press and he didn’t help himself, did he? Bless him. I remember watching some videos he was in and being, like, ‘God, what a tit.’ But the reality was that he was just a young lad, famous far too young, who had addiction trouble – and everyone hit him with the pitchforks.”

When asked about the lyric “You’ll sell me / You’ll kill me”, if Fender was talking about himself, he said: “Entirely. It’s reminding me that I don’t have to be under the thumb. At the end of the day, if I want to stop I’ll stop.”

Elsewhere, he also spoke about the the difference between people who take drugs at music industry parties and friends who take them up north.

“Well, I’ve noticed that my drug addict friends who are posh go to rehab, but my mates with issues up there just die,” he said.

Fender continued: “People are very unaware. We are very good at talking about privileges – white, male or straight privilege. We rarely talk about class, though. And that’s a lot of the reason that all the young lads are seduced by demagogues like Andrew Tate.

“They’re being shamed all the time and made to feel like they’re a problem. It’s this narrative being told to white boys from nowhere towns. People preach to some kid in a pit town in Durham who’s got fuck all and tell him he’s privileged? Then Tate tells him he’s worth something? It’s seductive.”

[Full article here]