Tag: Margret RoadKnight

Digressions – The future for independent music

image by Pixabay.com

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 10th 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.

 

House music

Kieran 01
Irish songwriter Kieran Halpin entertaining the audience at a Goodwills house concert, 2011

Check out the audience next time you’re at a classical recital. It’s a fair bet they will be actively listening. There will be no background chatter, no clatter of glasses and cups or the hiss of a cappuccino machine. Classical musicians and house concert performers expect and receive 100% audience attention.
So it was at a private house concert we went to last Sunday to listen to Joel Woods play classical guitar pieces and a difficult Bach composition on a 150-year-old mandolin. The concert was held on the veranda of an old Queenslander and was by invitation, only as the host had a limited number of chairs. The hosts were a little nervous as they’d not held a house concert before and were worried about road noise, birds and other neighbourhood distractions (none of which mattered one bit).

Musical chairs

On Monday night we ducked down to the UpFront Club in Maleny’s main street, a now-ex watering hole and music venue. The sad but inevitable occasion was “The Last Hurrah” – the final Monday night blackboard music night before the venue closed, after a lengthy financial struggle to stay afloat.
A local woman I met in the street yesterday described the music on the night as “fantastic”. I’ll admit, having since watched a few dodgy smart phone videos, that did appear to be the case: if you were in the front two rows, that is.
Sorry, with 150 people milling about outside the venue and on the footpath and standing room only inside, I could not hear much music at all.
I will say this – one’s preference for listening to live music does change as you age (and get hearing aids).
Nonetheless, this was situation normal for the UpFront Club on a Monday night where people gathered to eat, drink and talk while amateurs, semi-professionals and the occasional professional musician soldiered on through their 15-minute sets. As someone commented, people used to listen but the drinkers and the ‘maggers’ got the upper hand.
(For our foreign edition readers, a ‘magger’ is someone who chatters for the sake of chattering).
Generations of Australians have grown up listening to live music in this way (as background to social conversation, usually in a bar where amber fluid flows and conversations become shouting matches). The PA gets turned up to combat the rising volume of human conversation until a point is reached when the audience gives up and heads for the dance floor or the door.

The Talkers vs the Listeners
This is a universal theme in licensed venues. We were in Toowoomba years ago and saw a poster advertising songwriter Penelope Swales at an Irish bar. We went along, fighting our way through the Saturday night throng and high volume hub-bub.
“This must be the wrong place,” I shouted. “She’s not here.” But she was there, tucked away in the corner on a tiny stage with barely room to swing a guitar. We got very close, but it has to be said the intimate impact of a Swales performance was lost. Penelope writes and sings long involved songs, usually introduced by a story of equal length. The next time we saw Penelope I mentioned we’d quietly dubbed it ‘the gig from hell’. “Oh I remember that,” she said. “I got paid $300.”

House music rules!

When we lived in Brisbane in the 1990s, we started promoting a few acoustic concerts at various venues, hiring sound gear and booking emerging artists of the time like Women in Docs and Ohneatasweata. Some concerts were financially successful and some were not, mainly because we stuck to a commitment to pay the artists an agreed fee.
In the mid-1990s, we moved to a larger house in Brisbane – big enough for a house concert, someone said. So we took a punt and asked Margret RoadKnight if she’d perform.
We set up the lounge with as many chairs as we owned, then borrowed others from friends and neighbours as the bookings came in. So on a humid March night, not knowing what to expect, 60 people turned up to hear a set of songs from us (The Goodwills) and then an hour or so from Margret. We performed unplugged, so as a matter of course, the audience paid rapt attention. You would not have heard a pin drop because we had wall to wall carpets, but you get the point.
We were enthused; it cost us next to nothing to stage the concert and Margret got a decent fee, so it didn’t take us long to start planning the next one. We had an ever-expanding email list, so used that to promote a series of concerts with guests including Women in Docs, Penelope Swales, Rough Red, Rebecca Wright, Cloudstreet, Kath Tait and Phil Garland.
The concept is of great value to narrative songwriters, acapella groups or instrumentalists who revel in the rare circumstance of playing acoustic instruments on a hardwood floor (i.e. Celtic harpist Andy Rigby and friends in Maleny last year).

There is a place for an UpFront Club vibe – percussive dance groups revel in the noisy, packed room environment. But it is no place to listen to a songwriter with stories to tell. Renowned Irish songwriter Kieran Halpin strolled into the Monday night chalkboard one evening in winter, circa 2007. He and his family were travelling around Australia in a camper van and making contacts for future tours. He got up, introduced only as ‘Kieran’, sung his three songs, sold a couple of CDs to people at the back who were actually listening, and later pronounced the gig “Pretty good, all things considered.”
“I won the $30 and got a slice of pizza,” he told me afterwards. “It was only $15 to stay at the showgrounds so yeah, it was a good gig.”
Yet the man who wrote “All the Answers”, “Nothing to Show for it All” and “Angel of Paradise” came and went, largely ignored by the Monday night maggers. What they may have missed was a man who has recorded 18 albums and had songs covered by artists including Ilse De Lange, Vin Garbutt, Dolores Keane, Tom McConville, Niamh Parsons, The Battlefield Band and Brisbane singer John Groome.
It would be fair to point out A Bit of Folk on the Side (a monthly folk club) operated at the club for nine years without any amplification and people by and large did the right thing, so it is possible.

Guilty as charged, mate

“You’re a bit precious about that, mate” a young business acquaintance told me once, explaining why he wouldn’t come to a house concert. “I like to stand at the bar and have a few and I’ll listen if the music grabs me, otherwise I’ll talk to my mates.”
Others might say if your music is good enough, people will pay attention, but as the ‘Kieran’ anecdote shows, that is not always the case.
The Guardian’s Indie Professor (anthropologist Wendy Fonarow), analyses this topic in some detail (see link) but I’m tempted to end with her most pertinent quote:
“Ultimately, talking at shows is a bit like watching someone play with their smartphone. It’s irritating whenever it isn’t you.”