It’s been a while, as usual…
Another three-month epic of a recording and mixing process
for this latest Bikini Test Failure single, Nip And Tuck, but I’m happy to say
only about ten days to make a little YouTube video for it; I’m clearly getting
faster, if not better, at some things.
It was undoubtedly during a Word In Your Ear podcast that I
caught writer/broadcaster David Hepworth repeat something he’d overheard,
namely that you can always tell when someone’s “had a bit of work done”; they
have the look of the permanently surprised!
Funny in itself, if not entirely fair or accurate, it
clearly tickled something in me. For decades, again unfairly and certainly in
ignorance, I’ve been aware that folk who “have a bit of work done” tend to look
everso slightly ridiculous in one way or another and rarely “better” than they
did before – whatever “better” means.
I can infer, of course, that for every oddly altered person
it’s possible to spot, there may be dozens who go undetected, their subtle
alterations serving them well in their finite battle against clock and
calendar.
So a bit of hearsay and my low-brow pondering, triggered a
very satisfying and productive bout of songwriting, which after only 20
minutes, resulted in all the lyrics I would need to complete the song and
sadly, quite a few more I was unable to jam in.
Nip And Tuck is the 14th release of Blague
Records, which I started in the mid-‘90s. As time has revealed, a vanity label for
my own music, nevertheless begun with serious intent and huge ambition. Like
all aspiring indie label bosses, I subscribed to the UK’s trade magazine, MusicWeek (Billboard seemed an unnecessary extravagance!) In it, you’d find a
complete list of that week’s single and album releases.
I would always feel swamped by the sheer number of
competitors: 300 new singles per week. Many were from major labels and most of
the others surely had larger budgets than mine (which was near-zero) but I was
still proud and pleased to occasionally make it into MW’s review pages, perhaps
one of only ten chosen that week.
It’s been clear since my Great Comeback last year, that the
small-scale Indie Music Industry is not what it was; there was never much money
sloshing around – now there aren’t even any sales to fight over.
It might seem obvious, but it’s worth stating: streams are
not the equivalent of old-fashioned record sales! They’re far more akin to
radio-plays. And where once my little BTF tunes might be played on a local,
community, college or commercial radio station, here in the UK or across the
States, Canada, and even Australia, each time to an audience varying from a few
hundred to tens of thousands, (and earning performance royalties as they went!)
I find that my virtually-free, modern-day streams can only limp slowly through
double-figures before finally collapsing, exhausted in the low-hundreds. It’s
quite devastating really.
I shouldn’t be so astonished. The aforementioned Mr Hepworth
also recently pointed out that Spotify uploads a total of, wait for it, sixty
THOUSAND songs a DAY! Apparently two-thirds of those are “back-catalogue”
(meaning two or more years old). So that leaves a mere 140,000 new-new singles
to compete with. That week.
I should have made my millions back in the day when it was
just me and 299 other hopefuls!
