CDs - thegoodwills.com

Digressions – The future for independent music

Nothing sums up the brutal futility of the Israel/Gaza war more succinctly than Two Brothers, a folk song by UK songwriter Pete Morton. The lyric imagines a mother, fed up with the squabbling siblings, Israel and Palestine: “I don’t care who started it, just try and get along.”

Morton’s song has been criticised as ‘condescending,’ that it trivialises a complex Middle East conflict. But the central message – a call for peace – can’t be dismissed.

The song was on the set list of Irish singer/songwriter Enda Kenny when he performed at the Maleny Music Festival on November 10-12.

Kenny was born in Dublin, but knows a bit about conflict, as he spent a year volunteering at the Glencree Reconciliation Centre in County Wicklow. There he worked with kids from Northern Ireland (Glencree was where the Good Friday Agreement was signed).

Maleny poet Irish Joe Lynch took up the theme at the festival’s Peace concert held on Remembrance Day. He pointed to the peace accord struck in Ireland in 1998 as a message to Israel and Gaza that enemies can lay down their guns and make peace.

The Goodwills (our band), also performed at the Maleny festival, our fifth appearance in a decade, which got me musing about work and music and how so many people can’t see it as the same thing.

Men my age often ruminate about relevancy once they have decided to give away working for a living. Some, particularly those whose work gave them a public profile, or who had Very Important Work, struggle with the ‘Bob Who? Syndrome. I’d have to say that leaving behind a job where my name was in the State’s newspaper every day didn’t bother me much at all. Given the decline in quality and relevance in mainstream media since I quit in 2005, I definitely do not regret leaving daily newspapers when I did. It also gave us an opportunity to tour New South Wales and Queensland with Macca and the Gumboot band.

After the tour in 2005, we set up a media consultancy business. Contacts I’d made in my professional life started steering work my way. Unlike my day job as a journalist/editor, it was anonymous work. But it paid the bills and until the Global Financial Crisis came along it served us well.

We operated our cottage music business in tandem and this too involved a degree of public exposure. If you are going to write songs, record them, tour, perform and sell CDs, you need to create a public profile – a persona if you will.

The 10^th Maleny Music Festival was our fourth major gig for 2023. Considering that some independent musicians play live at least twice a week, that’s not much to boast about. But I was reminded at the festival when in conversation with younger musicians, that not many of us persist with it into our mid-70s.

I could and will point you to legendary Australian folk jazz and blues singer Margret RoadKnight, who at 80 has just released a new CD of material recorded over the past 35 years. The splendid album, Long Time, is available online and on the ubiquitous download and streaming apps.

Roger Ilott and Penny Davies, who have been producing folk music albums from their Restless Music studio near Storm King Dam on the Granite Belt, are ‘contemporaries’ who are also still performing and recording. Roger has added his experience and polish to some of my later-life songs. Since I seem to be writing new material again, there is little reason not to continue recording and distributing heartfelt music.
Penny and Roger have produced 25 albums of mostly original material, some in collaboration with the late Bill Scott. As you will notice if you visit their website, they too have stopped producing new CDs, relying on the download model, although as Penny says, they will make one-off CDs ‘for luddites on request’.

These days you can order a physical CD or download the music from Bandcamp, currently the champion of independent musicians. If someone pays $10 to download an MP3 album, Bandcamp sends us $7, more or less. By contrast, Spotify and the like pay fractions of a cent per ‘stream.’

As a singer-songwriter duo of considerable vintage (45 years), it’s clear that people who like our music already have the albums. New punters, like our neighbours in the caravan park, point to their motor home and complain it does not have a CD player.

If I want to deliberately listen to music (as opposed to putting it on as background), I put five CDs in the refurbished Sony CD-changer I bought for $300 and crank up the volume. My new hearing aids have a ‘listen to music’ setting which enhances the experience.

After a long period in decline, CD sales are on the rise again, just as sales of vinyl albums had begun to outsell CDs. Tony Van Veen of discmakers.com wrote in a recent blog that physical music sales for the first half of 2022 were $781 million — up more than 10% from the prior year — and on track to be over $1.6 billion for the full year.

Self-funded independent musicians have no choice now but to produce music in a range of formats, including CDs. If you order a minimum of 500 copies (the industry yardstick), it’s an expensive business. A budget of between $5,000 and $10,000 is typical. Costs include time spent recording the tracks, paying musicians who contributed their talents, paying an artist to produce CD artwork and an engineer to mix and master the album. Then you have to order the CDs and pay for the replication of artwork and music.

As you have already realised, this leaves no money at all to spend on promotion and this is where most independent CDs fail..

Meanwhile, 574 million people are listening to music on Spotify every month. It’s free (with ad breaks) or subscribers pay $180 a year. That is about the price of seven independent CDs. We’re on Spotify too. But maybe not for much longer, given Spotify’s intention to stop paying royalties to musicians who tally fewer than 1000 streams in a year.

Spotify is a listed company, with its founding shareholders owning 27.30% of the company, which last traded at $US180. According to Yahoo Finance, some 800+ institutions own the rest. This Swedish audio streaming service made $12.356B in first half revenue, an 8.02% increase from 2021.

Spotify has 226 million paying subscribers. In the most recent quarter, Spotify made a $65 million euro profit.

The average royalty payment from Spotify is $0.003 to $0.005 cents per stream. It can take 280,000 streams for a musician to earn $1000 in royalties, according to industry estimates. Rival platforms like Napster or Apple Music are more generous, but even on Napster you’d need 60,000 streams to make $1000. On the fast-emerging YouTube music streaming platform, a couple of videos we made to highlight our songs have had more than 1,000 views. That’s technically not ‘streams’ but accounts for the cents and parts of cents detailed on my most recent royalty statement.

(free to view)

Seventy percent of the royalties paid by Spotify go to the major labels which place their artists’ music on the platform. As usual, the songwriters and the musicians who created the works are at the bottom of the food chain. (It rather astounds me that musicians have agreed to this egregious arrangement. Musicians- just say ‘no’! Ed)

It’s no surprise to learn that the Musicians Union is on Spotify’s case.

PS: Check out Enda Kenny’s home page for an insight into life on the road. He’s not on Spotify so this is the place to download or buy a CD.

The future for record stores

future-record-stores — Image: A selection from the B’s. How many of these do you have?

While my friends in New Zealand were still at school, I was making apprentice wages, spending almost all of it on records. Our small town didn’t have a record store as such, but the local department store stocked the latest pop records. At the time, LPs were pressed at a factory in Wellington owned by His Master’s Voice (HMV). My copy of ‘Please Please Me’ (The Beatles), for example, was issued by Parlophone in Mono. It still plays OK but it sounds thin compared to the sophisticated sounds of Pink Floyd or the Moody Blues.

New Zealand’s music fans had the jump on most other countries when the latest Beatles album became a ‘must have now’ item. The masters were shipped to Wellington and the presses were set to work. Other countries usually had to wait for a shipment of imported records.

‘Please Please Me’ was rushed out by Parlophone in March 1963 (I was 14), so maybe I bought it with money from my paper run. Parlophone was eager to cash in on the title track, the group’s first No 1 hit in the UK.

Roll forward to 2023 and my LP collection is stacked neatly in two cupboards, very rarely played. I have a good quality record player hooked up to my stereo with a pre-amp, so I’m not sure why they don’t get more of a playing. Ah yes, it’s the getting up and flipping the record over to the six or seven tracks on side two.

The big change between my teenage consumption of music and now is that, for the most part, we listened to music in one room. We would typically lie on the floor (parents were out, obviously), and crank up the volume. There may have been alcohol.

By comparison, today’s music listener can stream an endless Spotify playlist from their phone to a Bluetooth speaker at home or in the car (or through earbuds). It might be inferior quality, but it’s easy.

What set me off on this tangent was reading about the imminent closure of the Sanity record chain. Our town has one of their outlets. I didn’t shop there often but bought a few CDs – Kasey Chambers, Troy Casser-Daley. Now, as stocks starts to dwindle, I’m having a look for bargains. They sell DVDs too.

Sanity is closing all 50 stores as leases expire and moving to an online business model. Sanity is not the first retail chain to retire from shopping centres, where so many retailers have found that the foot traffic doesn’t always translate to turnover to offset higher rents.

This is not an isolated development, with a couple of Brisbane record stores closing their doors and Melbourne’s iconic Basement Discs set to do the same. Co-owner Suzanne Bennett told The Age that the impact of Covid and a drop in foot traffic reduced revenue. The CBD store was established for 28 years and famous for its in-store performances by musicians including The Teskey Brothers, Paul Kelly, Billy Bragg and Justin Townes Earle. This is not to say Basement Discs is going out of business. Suzanne and partner Rod Jacobs will continue to operate online and have a dream of opening another shop in the suburbs.

As I discovered, after chatting online with former colleague Noel Mengel, there are still some funky record stores around in Brisbane. But the independents have mostly moved to the suburbs to find cheaper rents.

Noel, who was chief music writer at The Courier-Mail for 15 years, said that most shopping centres had an independent record store. In recent years most have closed or moved to the suburbs.

“Every shopping centre had one, usually as well as Sanity or HMV, for example Sounds at Chermside, Brookside Music Centre and Toombul Music. Rockaway Records is a groovy store still going at Carindale Shopping Centre. It used to be near the Paddington shops before that.

“There are lots of Indie record stores now in Brisbane, but rents are too high in shopping centres. The independents include Sonic Sherpa at Stones Corner, Stash Records at Camp Hill, Dutch Vinyl in Paddington and Jet Black Cat in West End. So that niche market, import vinyl thing is going OK.

“But those shops really used to add something to the shopping centres.”

Rockaway, established in 1992, is one of the last indie stores in Brisbane shopping centres. Long-established Rocking Horse Records and Record Exchange continue to trade in the CBD.

As music production formats and distribution began to change, famous record stores like Harlequin and Skinny’s disappeared. Even with Sanity moving out, there are still big retail chains in shopping centres like JB Hi Fi that sell CDs and vinyl albums.

We old school music listeners grew up browsing record stores, from the days of vinyl in the 1960s, through the transition to cassettes (1970s) and CDs (the 1990s) and into the brave new world of downloading and streaming music. This arguably began with Apple Itunes in 2001, although the original Napster found a way in 1999 for users to share music through peer-to-peer file sharing.

Although it was shut down in 2002 after a plethora of legal actions, you may be aware that Napster re-emerged later under new owners and is now a legitimate alternative to Spotify.

The best and most popular physical record stores are those that specialise in rare and second-hand vinyl. They are not always easy to find, as they need to find a shop in the suburbs where rents are viable.

Long-time reader Franky’s Dad (aka Lyn Nuttall) is someone who has a history of browsing in such shops. These days though he confesses to preferring streaming services like Spotify.

“Platforms like this are made for me. They seem to have every track in the universe. They don’t of course, but lately my bowerbird approach is served by YouTube, where numerous collectors seem to have posted their entire collections.
“These days I can find even the most obscure or lost tracks from the 50s and 60s”.

Lyn, who hosts the website poparchives began collecting vinyl 45s via mail order in the 1980s & 1990s, mostly through record auctioneers – “I think I paid the rent of one bloke in Sydney.”
“I do miss combing through the racks for the physical object. Even at the time I used to say that half the pleasure was the hunt and the item in your hand after you’d paid for it.”

Noel Mengel, now a freelance journalist who also plays in his own band, The Trams, says Brisbane is well served by independent, suburban record stores.

As the figures below show, there has been rapid growth in demand for vinyl records. Noel welcomed the recent addition of a vinyl pressing factory in Brisbane as there were previously huge delays for those pressing vinyl.

“The community radio station 4ZZZ does a great job playing Queensland music and the independent stores sell their records.”

Figures from ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) show that vinyl album sales ($28.51 million) outsold CD albums ($23.90 million) for calendar year 2021. Vinyl sales have increased steadily since 2012 (then just $1.85 million) compared to CD sales in that year ($193.49 million).

All of which reminds me I promised my niece I would bring some of my old jazz records when we visit NZ next month. She and her husband only listen to vinyl. I reckon they are on to something.

Last week: It was Wirth’s Circus.

How we listen to music in 2022

cassettes-cds-streaming — Image: Technology exists to convert a cassette to MP3 – have we had a copyright ruling on that?

This week I decided to reflect on the many ways we can listen to music in this digital age. We’ve come a long way since the first recording etched on to a wax cylinder in 1860. In just 50 years, the mainstream way of listening to music has moved from vinyl LPs to cassettes to CDs and now to online streaming. It’s been quite an evolution.

This FOMM was inspired by a frustrating search for an album by Californian bluegrass singer AJ Lee and her band, Blue Summit. I was introduced to AJ at U3A Warwick’s Music Show, where presenters curate a list of YouTube clips and provide background on the tracks. This particular song was performed by the Brothers Comatose and AJ Lee, a splendid interpretation of Neil Young’s Harvest Moon.

On Monday I started packing for a week away in the caravan, part of it at the best music festival in Queensland, Neurum Creek Festival. This one has been running for 16 years at the Neurum Creek Bush Retreat, which is about 12 kms from Woodford. In preparing and packing, I decided to see if I could load new music on my Ipod, which is no longer supported by Apple. The problem is that as I now longer use ITunes, the music player I use can’t ‘talk’ to the Ipod. Mr Shiraz sent me a link to a piece of software that will mimic ITunes so you can ‘sync’ your music collection with an Ipod, a portable music player invented by Apple in 2001. Since Apple stopped supporting Ipods, many users have opted to put them in a drawer and move on. One alternative is to buy a cheap mobile phone, add a large storage card and use it as a personal music player.

I could tell how far CDs had dropped in popularity when looking to buy AJ Lee’s 2021 album, I’ll Come Back. I decided not to download it on Spotify, as the artists are paid a trifling amount when we listen to their music on that platform.

Subsequent searches found the album on streaming services, which was not what I wanted. I went direct to AJ Lee’s website and the only option was to purchase a physical CD and wait however many weeks or months it takes to arrive from the US. Then I tried Bandcamp (where you will find our music). Success, the album was there. I duly downloaded the album and now can listen to it on my computer, my phone and, once I get around to it, burn a CD for my ‘new’ 5-CD changer.

The CD player failed some months ago and I eventually established that the model was obsolete and a replacement laser could not be found. I opted for a refurbished model from a seller on Ebay. It’s a quality Sony deck and, so far, is working perfectly.

Before I went into hospital for a procedure in late August, I spent a day (dusting) and alphabetising our CD collection (450-plus). I told She Who Loves Order in her Life I had done this ‘so if I cark it, at least you’ll know the CDs are in A-Z and not filed according to ‘mood’.

As audiophiles will tell you, CD music is superior to cassette but inferior to vinyl, because the digital sound is compressed.

Vinyl music played on top line analogue systems always sounds better than both CDs and the alternative (playing or streaming MP3 quality tracks). The cassette, with its annoying hiss and tendency to become snarled in the player, is a long last.

Audio cassettes were invented by a Dutch company (Philips) and adopted by mainstream America in the mid-60s. My memory of cassettes is that people would borrow someone else’s tape and dub a cassette to play in the car. This practice was and still is illegal, even if retailers happily sold boxes of blank cassettes and high-end twin cassette decks on which one could dub to a blank tape. (The last piece of music technology I actually understood. Ed.)

Most of us have a couple of shoeboxes in the cupboard full of cassettes – legitimate ones bought in music stores, or bootleg copies. The difficulty now is that, for most people, their means of playing cassettes has evaporated. My tape deck worked for about 20 years. One deck stopped working and then the sound quality became so poor we decided to switch to another medium.

I did a straw poll among people of my vintage to establish how they listen to music (if they listen to music at all). Most said they no longer had a CD player (it either died or they found the business of swapping them over tedious). Most late model cars no longer come with a CD player, so that accelerated the decline in popularity.

Some people opt for a WIFI speaker through which they can stream music from YouTube or Spotify. How this works is you turn the gadget on and say in a loud, clear voice: “OK Google, play The Goodwills.” There is a pause, a whirring sound and a disembodied voice says: “OK, playing DJ Goodwill.”

Others turn on their smart TV and then search for music videos on YouTube. Depending on your cinema surround sound system (if you have one), the sound quality is OK. The database of video clips is apparently bottomless, but the quality is uneven.

According to Gizmodo’s history of the compact disc, the first commercial CDs were available in Australia in late 1982 (about 150 titles). This was a few years before we moved to Brisbane and bought a Technics stereo system for around $1,500 (it was on sale). We started a CD collection then and even today, I prefer a CD to any other format.

What is hard to stomach is knowing I paid $25 to $30 each and sometimes more for an imported disc. Today you can go to a charity shop and buy CDs for coins. It’s not about money, though. Our CD collection is special in that at least 100 CDs were given to us either as a gift or as a swap (one of ours for one of theirs) by musicians we know.

The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) said streaming accounted for 86% of $565.8 million music sales in Australia in 2021. Over the same period, physical music sales dropped from $100.5 million to $56.1 million. Vinyl albums led the way at $29.7 million, compared with $24.9 million for CD albums.

A Roy Morgan research report in 2020 said 12.7 million Australians were using a streaming service. Spotify is the clear market leader with 8m customers, almost double what it was in 2017. YouTube Music is next with 4.4m users in Australia.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) concurs, saying 61% of Australians used a streaming service in June 2020, up from 48% in 2019. As you’d expect, 88% of the 18-34 age group used music streaming services. Surprisingly (well, I’m surprised), the biggest growth in online music streaming was the 55-64 cohort (from 47% to 59%), 65-75 (30% to 44%) and the over-70s (17% to 26%).

I confess I’m part of that trend, although this weekend it’s all about live music, coffee and a CD shop – the way it should be.

Is vinyl just a fad?

The first reference that came up when I searched ‘vinyl fad’ was an advertisement for high waist stretch vinyl leggings (only $15.60 from boo-hoo Aus.). That’s not a plug, you understand, just an observation on the randomness of internet searches.

Vinyl records, or LPs as they were known in my youth, have indeed made a comeback, after being superseded by compact discs (CDs) some 30 years ago. In the US, where such trends usually start and end, 9.7 million vinyl LPs were sold in 2018. This was a 12% increase on the 8.6 million copies sold in 2017.

In Australia, 860,000 vinyl albums were sold in 2018, up from 717,000 in 2017. The revival began in 2015 with a modest 314,000 copies sold.

Demand for new music on vinyl is such that last year Sony started manufacturing vinyl albums in Japan. Australia’s only pressing plant, Zenith Records, will be joined by a new pressing plant competitor, Program Records.

Vinyl seems destined, however, to remain a small-scale, boutique business compared with the growth of music streaming. ARIA (the Australian Recording Industry Association) said music streaming (wholesale) revenue continued its explosive growth pattern in 2018. It now accounts for 71.4% of the overall market by value amid annual growth of 41.2%.

The streaming category includes revenues from subscription services (Apple Music, Deezer, Google Play,Spotify etc) and on-demand streaming services such as YouTube and Vevo.

The compact disc format continued its gradual decline, securing 10% of music market revenue with just $53.17 million in sales.

By comparison, streaming services and digital downloads earned $445 million in combined sales.

Vinyl sales grew from $15.79 million in 2015 to $21.73 million last year, robust enough sales to keep the industry interested.

Yamaha Music USA’s Ted Goslin says the return of the vinyl LP is being drive by the under-25s hipsters. “Visit your local record store”, Goslin writes, “Chances are you’ll spot a man bun, a flannel shirt or some other identifiable accoutrement of this popular sub-culture.”

Collectors are also driving the renaissance of vinyl, constantly scanning second hand shops for a rare gem to add to their collections. The other demographic adopting vinyl as a serious hobby are people in their 30s and 40s, who can probably afford the high quality speakers, amps and turntables it takes to make vinyl sound good.

This topic came to mind after I retrieved 200+ vinyl albums from the bottom of the linen cupboard, where they have been for 17 years, and packed them into three plastic milk crates. As some of you may know, we are packing up and moving on. Expect a flurry of stories in coming weeks about packing too soon (“Honey, where’s the can opener?”), decluttering and when does sentiment outweigh practicality.

The most sought after vinyl albums are usually in mint condition (rarely or never played) and of course everyone wants 0000001 of the Beatles White Album, sold at auction recently for $790,000.

Over the years, I have had occasion to liberate an album from the linen cupboard and give it a spin. I once went through a whole week of listening to vinyl and nothing else. It’s true what they say – the sound is mellower, easier on the ears than the compressed attack of digital audio. But you have to sit down and actively listen and not have it on in the background like a café mix.

There’s a quiet hiss and an occasional crackle as we listen to the likes of the Moody Blues, Blood Sweat and Tears or Joni. Sonic heaven.

But it’s a pain getting up to flip the album over, isn’t it?

If you have looked after your records, it seems not to matter if they’ve been in a cupboard for 20 years. They will play like it was Yesterday or Tomorrow (Never Knows). There’s a certain level of frustration now, as I sift through these albums, having packed the record player away.

The other attraction of vinyl albums is the elaborate cover artwork that helps make LPs more collectable. Obvious examples include Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (a pre Photo Shop montage); Blind Faith’s bare-breasted teen holding a model aeroplane (it was banned in some countries) and Nirvana’s Nevermind, a baby in a swimming pool seemingly chasing a dollar bill.

There were also some stunning Pink Floyd covers by design company Hipgnosis; a man bursting into flames, hospital beds on a beach, a shaft of white light passing through a prism to become a rainbow.

So when I was asked was it really necessary to keep the vinyl collection, I had to say yes. It is an important connection to my youth and early songwriting influences and yes, I do listen.

The LP (long player) collection is quite eclectic and includes a lot of jazz and blues (my earliest influence until I discovered The Shadows). I have discovered that my niece and her husband are not just vinyl converts, they love jazz. So I have promised to give them my jazz albums, which include five recordings by the Dave Brubeck Quartet (note to executor).

The collection includes a lot of folk albums that I purchased for small amounts of cash at a time when record shops were having sales to get rid of surplus stock before CDs arrived. I would not dream of getting rid of such gems as albums by Kath Tait, the McGarrigle Sisters, Silly Sisters, Martin Carthy, Bert Jansch, Van Morrison, Maddy Prior, The Pogues and Christy Moore.

Meanwhile, I discovered that banana boxes from our friendly IGA were perfect for packing CDs. Just fill in the small spaces with paper or bubble wrap, put the lid on and tape it up with ‘FRAGILE” writ large on the box. So far I’ve filled five of these boxes. Not to mention the four boxes of unsold stock from our recording ventures.

Much has been written about the decline of the CD, signs of which have become obvious. Few laptops now come with a built-in CD/DVD reader/player. Likewise, many modern cars don’t have CD players. As far as I can tell, the new medium for the average music listener is a Google app, Bluetooth, a smart phone and a subscription to a streaming service.

My brother-in-law has a Google Play speaker in his lounge room – hours of endless fun. As I have previously observed, the app struggles with different voices and often chooses the wrong song:

Bob: “OK Google, play The Goodwills.”

Google: “Alright. Here’s DJ Goodwill from YouTube Channel”

Bob: “Stop, Google. Play T.H.E. Goodwills”

This time it works and, because all of Google’s music is drawn from its subsidiary, YouTube, we hear one of our songs used as a soundtrack for a six-minute video. It’s confusing.

I ask Ms Google to play ‘Silhouettes’ and once again she turns up a more recent song of the same name (by Avicii).

Bob: “No, no, Google. Play Silhouettes by The Rays”

Ms Google: “Alright alright! Playing creepy voyeur stalker song Silhouettes by The Rays.”

Bob: “What! Are you developing independent thinking now, like Hal from 2001 a Space Odyssey? Also, you need to learn how to use commas.”

Ms Google: “Look Bob, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over”.

Further reading: Some technical opinions of interest only to audiophiles.

FOMM back pages – https://bobwords.com.au/planned-obsolescence-strikes-again/

Little boxes – the genre-fication of music

music-genre-CD — Old-school CD music collection by Mr Shiraz)

Yes I know it’s my fault, but early in the days of turning my music into online MP3s, I accidently chose Christian Rap as a genre for one of my songs. The song I incorrectly categorised is called 53 & Fragile, about a fellow taking stress leave to ponder his future. I guess you could rap to it, in a God-less sort of way. It only took three years to discover this error.

An enterprising blogger (Glenn McDonald) compiled a list of 1,264 micro-genres; they include goa trance, aggrotech, gabba, yellow mellow, happyhardcore, terrorcore, ghost step and Nordic house.

There are many reasons why the recorded music business is in a state of flux but I continue to believe (and I’m not alone), that the industry’s insistence on streaming music into little boxes called genres has robbed many a musician of potential fans.

As Sydney Morning Herald reviewer Bernard Zuel said of a Luke O’Shea album – it is put into a box labelled Country and as a result, a great many people will never open that box. This is likely to be the case, despite someone with Zuel’s acumen identifying all manner of pop, rock and hip hop influences in O’Shea’s music.

When we released our CD, The Last Waterhole, in 2015, it was our first real engagement with online music. After labouring through the online applications (and printing out paper copies), our music was magically turned into MP3s (compressed audio files), and made available for download on CD Baby and subsequently ITunes, Amazon Music, Google Music and more.

We sold the expected number of CDs, but three years later our album has drifted out to sea as thousands of new releases come in with every second wave. Online sales are about as sporadic as our public appearances.

The indie market is cluttered with home-made CDs recorded on a laptop and flogged at markets for $10. Those with loftier ambitions engage a producer and typically spend $6,000 to $10,000, which is all very well if you can sell 500 copies at $20 each. At the high end of the game, production companies spend up to $100,000 on a CD that will jump out of the radio like a rabbit on steroids. But over a long span of time, I suspect, the listening public’s ears are getting tired of it all. There’s way too much of it, no quality control and the harsh, metallic attack of compressed digital music has taken the edge off the listening pleasure.

And, as our producer predicted, the day is coming when people won’t need to own CDs anymore – all they‘ll need is a Bluetooth speaker.

“OK, Google, play The Goodwills.”

“OK, here’s the YouTube channel for the DJ Goodwill.”

The science is imperfect, but it seems to be enough for an alarmingly large group of people, who can buy an OK-quality music-streaming speaker for a few hundred dollars. The latest research estimates the value of the global portable Bluetooth speaker market at over US$4 billion, expected to double by the end of 2025.

A few years back the grand dame of folk and blues Margret RoadKnight posted an article on Facebook from Digital Music News with the droll comment “Why I’m up for House/’Salon’ concerts!!”

The article outlined the industry’s 99 (main) problems, the key one being that musicians and artists are finding it harder to “monetize” what they do, whether performing or selling merchandise.

People have got used to free stuff and now they won’t pay unless they are very drunk and you’re giving away a t-shirt or stubby holder as well.

I asked a 20-something lad why he thought nothing of shelling out $20 for a pizza but he was reluctant to pay $20 for an album.

“Yeh, but I know what a meat lovers’ pizza is like, right? And I get garlic bread.”

“But you only get to eat the pizza once,” I reasoned. “You can play a CD over and over. A pizza won’t make you think about social issues.”

“Meh,” he said.

The Digital Music News article by Paul Resnikoff identifies issues with the method of delivering music. Streaming (subscription services which offer consumers a wide variety of music to listen to in-house but not download), continues to explode, but not enough to compensate for declines in physical CD sales and paid downloads.

We chose not to take up the offer to have our music on Spotify, a subscription streaming service, which in hindsight seems to have been a counter-productive decision. A musician friend Sarah Calderwood recently asked if we were on Spotify as she was compiling a playlist of Australian indie folk music which she planned to put on ‘repeat’.

If you have a Spotify account you can listen to Sarah’s playlist, which includes acts like Gone Molly, The Barleyshakes, Michael Fix, Women in Docs and Mark Cryle.

The independent musician, defined as a musician without financial backing, has to constantly find fresh ways of reaching new ears.

There’s a lot of indie musos around, competing with each other for gigs and CD sales. Increasingly they busk, or play for nothing at ‘walk-up’ venues which ask people to put their name on a blackboard and sing two or three songs. The artist might sell one or two CDs (if he or she is really good at making an impact and the song is up to the task). The alternative is a paid gig playing in a bar or restaurant where people go to eat, drink and talk.

Resnikoff writes that the key issue is that most consumers attribute very little value to the recording itself. They already heard the song on Spotify Soundcloud, Reverbnation, Bandcamp or YouTube.

The fractions of cents paid for streaming plays might add up to dollars eventually, but you need to keep selling ‘merch’ across all platforms.

From a financial point of view, it matters little to me that there are boxes of CDs in the hall cupboard, even if the ego grapples with the notion of relevancy.

It is a different story for people in their 20s and 30s who have decided to make music a full-time career. This involves constant touring, online management of their business and profile and (the thing nobody talks about), singing the same 10 or 12 songs every night, over and over. If you’re going for it, you have to keep churning out new material (thus consigning your older material to the remainder bin).

As one musician told me, “You have to keep putting new stuff out, even when you know it won’t pay for itself, otherwise you get forgotten about.”

House concerts, and we are long-term supporters, are a sure-fire way of giving musicians a listening audience. Even if only 20 people show up, it’s a better result financially and aesthetically than a rowdy Friday night pub gig. Audiences love the intimacy and the musical and lyrical nuances that are often lost in noisy, amplified venues. We’re hosting our 110^th house concert on June 10: check it out at

And the homemade afternoon tea on offer is guaranteed to be yummier than a meat lovers’ pizza and garlic bread.

Further reading: How Music Got Free, by Stephen Witt.