Julian Moore Blog

Any stories left?

Cast your mind back a few years to some of these headlines:

‘Lilly Allen discovered by blogging on MySpace’

‘Arctic Monkeys break through on MySpace’

‘Radiohead release In Rainbows - Pay What You Want upsets labels’

‘Trent Reznor releases NiN album for free’

For quite a few years, all this stuff was new and interesting and fed to us as the ‘new way forward’ for the music biz, for bands and for artists. However it wasn’t quite as much about the innovation as who could bag a story first. Because obviously, after a few similar stories there just wasn’t a story any more. First or bust.

Since then we’ve also had ‘Artist becomes famous from her basement’ and also ‘First unsigned band reach number one’.

Here’s a conversation I remember having with a London cabbie a few years back:

‘Yer see what you want to be doing n that is getting onto MySpace and then release it for free cos its all in the gigging nowadays innit and better than the fat cats getting in on it do you want my sons email site he’s going viral with his web video and messenger widget hes already got a thousand followers and has his own podcast power to the people thats what it is…’

That was only a few years ago, before Facebook and Twitter had kicked off. Pretty different now huh? Or not?

Haven’t heard of a band story for ages. There’s been viral videos - but now we’d all prefer to watch lolcats. There’ve been hilarious cover versions, but we’ve all seen them (we just made a non-hilarious cover version in Georgia Wonder, but that was just because we like the song).

There’ve been a few stories, but nothing as epic as the first four I mentioned at the start. Because when that was going on, for a few years it felt like the music biz was on the brink of something exciting and everyone was invited. It was part of popular culture and musicians and the public alike were talking about the dawning of a new age for the music biz.

So here we are. The playing field has been levelled. And everyone’s making stuff sort of a bit like the cab driver said.

Not very exciting though is it.

Or is it?

Know of a really cool new thing that a band is doing at the moment to get themselves known? Let me know!