You know what? Your song might not be a flop just because it doesn’t have any numbers. The numbers just show how much marketing that has been done. The numbers don’t tell you if the song is good or bad. The numbers just tell you how many that listened to it and that doesn’t even tell how long they spent of their time listening to the song.

We have a problem in the music industry because too many people believe that they can find the next thing strictly by the numbers. Not statistics, you can actually get info from statistics. Only information on things that are not the future (yet). I have seen new programs that can predict a little bit of how songs will perform in the future from the statistics, but just if nothing major happens.

If I only got a cent for each time I get that question I would have bought a nice flat in the center of London, maybe next to the Queen. No, it’s never the right time or the perfect setting for doing anything. Life would be very easy if it was that way.

I have met so many artists that just sit and wait for the right opportunity and the right place and time/ I have never seen any of these artists succeed or make a career either. I guess your worst enemy is that you think you should do everything in the right order in the right place and suddenly everything will be fine and you will be a superstar.

No, those moments don’t really exist. Hey, you say you read about them in a book about some artists the other week or in a blog post. Yes, there is a right place and time, but they never happen by chance. These moments will happen in a successful artist’s career and you will remember them later. The problem is that you never speak about all the other mistakes you did along the way, you just talk about that moment in interviews and books not what led up to that moment.

A new documentary that people should check out is about how social media is disrupting even democracy. And to quote the message that the Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff says in the movie “Social media should be forbidden”.

If there is anything right now that is killing the music, it’s social media! I have been wondering why I don’t get new songs? Okay, I’m over 35 and that means that your musical taste is set. I’m working in the industry, so I’m used to getting new music submitted to me since it’s part of my daily business. So if I can't find new music how can a normal fan have any chance of finding it?

Before I never had any challenges finding new music. Since the lockdown on COVID, I realized that all the new good music came from outside. Everything I discovered was through showcase festivals where people had curated line-up’s where I could go around like a smorgasbord and just discover new artists. In addition, I had a lot of great people that are creating new things and work really hard that could tip me off about great new artists and music they had found for me to just access.

(Part Four of Four)

Another topic to discuss is that people think it’s hard to place songs. After hundreds of placements, I can tell you that it’s not. Still, there is some stuff you need to consider.

Yes, it’s hard to be friends with supervisors and ad-agencies. If you want to be close to them you don’t have the time to be an artist. You need to spend your time between NYC, Los Angeles, and London and make sure you are invited to cool parties to meet all of them to find the latest leads. On top of that, you only have your songs. Okay that is maybe around 50 of them but supervisors need big catalogues of different music and they need it now, so you don’t have the time to write all the things they ask for even when you do get the leads.

Many times, I get the feeling that artists think that I can nag a music supervisor into giving me a placement. That is impossible. Sure, of course, the more people that know about the song the better the chances are. Still, if it is the wrong song it is the wrong song.

A placement is all about supplying the right song in the right place at the right price. So even if you just released this great single, I can’t get a supervisor to take it just because it fits your release plan. They might even want the single that you released three years ago since that fits. Then you just have to go with that or say no. The only time I can be of any assistance is if I have a song that is kind of similar to the one they have chosen but are not really satisfied with it for various reasons.

One problem I have is that the artist usually just comes up to me and says that they want me to place their music. It’s not that easy. If I going to approach supervisors, I really need to know all the rights and have those cleared. If I just borrow your song and try to place it, that would be like to borrowing your car. Sure, if I loaned it to a person that you admire like a famous movie star, maybe you wouldn’t mind. Still, I don’t think you would be totally happy that I just borrowed out your car to anyone.

You also want me to borrow out my own car to you. At the same time, why should I do that? Placing a song into production is a lot of work. Just doing it just to be friendly can be total professional suicide in the business.

(Part One of Four)

I got a request for placement on an old song from one of the supervisors I work with often. This song is from a band that is no longer exists. We create a deal that we can place the song anyway. Still, it was probably over five years ago someone requested something around the songs from their catalogue.

She had a lead on to someone that needed the song. But it was locked on YouTube through the aggregator to the song. This one was so old that back in the days we let the artist upload themselves to aggregators. The reason why we don’t let that happen now is pretty clear in what happened here.

She asked me if I knew the company that was blocking it as it was not the usual ones, so I had no clue. I then went back to the leader of the band and asked if he knew.

Since I hold a couple of gateways in various areas, I receive a lot of requests on social media. Most people are,of course, people I never have met in real life. There are fake accounts so the first thing you research is to find out if the person is actually real. If we have friends in common it is a sign that the person is real, not just one common friend but a couple.

Now these common friends also give away a hint of what level you are on in the industry. Almost like a fortune teller, I can read what you want and what will happen with your friend’s request. I have been playing with my staff here in the office to see if my theory is right and so far, I have been better than the fortune teller machine Zoltar in the movie “Big”.

One example is when an unknown artist is making a friend’s request. You can see that they are new to the industry, there are few friends and the ones they have are the usual local heroes in the area they are from. I usually say yes, and my guess is that that in the first 48 hours I will get a message with a question about sending a song for me to listen to.

A Facebook friend of mine asked this question: Artists, if you had an opportunity to sit down with an industry executive what is the one question you would ask?

It is kind of interesting what the artist would answer. My guess is, of course, they will be aggressive and start accusing this person because they haven’t succeeded yet. Like that would be this person’s fault? Okay, in the old industry there was gatekeepers. That is long gone, everything is really open. The fact is that nowadays it’s not hard to sit down and discuss with even the biggest industry executive what the goals are and how to achieve them.

"Another one bites the dust
And another one gone, and another one gone
Another one bites the dust…"

Yes, you can hear me humming that Queen song when I bump into artists or industry professionals that play the headless chicken game. This phrase was invented by an intern many years ago around the behavior of a couple of artists that had screwed him over.

“They just run around like a headless chicken screwing everyone or screwing each other!” he screamed in frustration. And the whole office just laughed out loud. We all knew what he meant; we all knew the behavior he was trying to describe. After that, it became known as “the headless chicken game.”

So, what it is when a person just runs around and tries to use everyone they meet as a steppingstone? At the same time, they try to be friends with everyone. They don’t understand that connections in this business are all about trust, networking, loyalty and friendships. So if they try to climb the ladder on several different places, the end result will be that everything crashes down around them.

Many artists follow all the rules and advice that are given to them at conferences, online or in workshops, etc. One rule seems though seems hard for them to understand: format.

Format is how the general audience listens and how music presented to them. You have every artistic right and freedom to not follow these format rules. You need to be aware that you are excluding yourself from a lot of listeners. No, you cannot change people. Either you change for them or you accept a smaller range of audiences. Either way is the right way for you, it's your choice. Right now, however, we have too many people that have chosen to leave formats and then doing PR and efforts that are in a format world, and then complaining that they don’t get the same chance as other artists and that the world is too shallow.

It seems like we need to know what value things have nowadays. Salt had huge value in the middle ages. Today you can buy salt fairly cheap. Things that used to have value might lose it now in our current times.

That is how to look at recordings. Just thirty years ago recording was an expensive endeavour. You needed quite a large financial investment to do a record that required a lot of money. And then you also thought twice about what to record and chose your songs carefully.

Today, I can just go down to the local electronic store, buy a kind of cheap microphone (or take the microphone that is built in a laptop) and just record a song. And then just put it on any social media channel in seconds, and even get it out on Spotify within 24 hours.

The problem here is that many think that the value of that recording is the same as the recordings of The Beatles on Abbey Road.  It’s not. Technology has provided us to have better equipment to record than The Beatles had ever dreamt about when they recorded Abbey Road. With that though came the idea is that everyone thinks they can write a song like “Yesterday”.

We all know that we are consuming too much for the planet. A third of all food we produce is thrown away as waste. That is 50,000kg or 11,0231lb a second thrown away as waste in the world and as Greta Thunberg has pointed out it’s not sustainable.

In an interview not long ago Marcus Ek from Spotify told artists that they need to release more content when he was questioned about Spotify and how they paid out so little to artists.

I just feel that we are doing the same stupid mistakes in the music business as we do in our food consumption. The new streaming economy is just one click and then forget it.

Same as the food; we produce a mountain of apples so you can have just one. And we produce a mountain of songs for you to listen to just one. Of course, this will affect the quality. To be able to produce a mountain you need start by giving fertilizer to the project, and you want everything to grow faster. Yes, you will get a decent product but it is not that perfect product that you had before.

It’s a very uncertain world we now currently find ourselves living in. On one hand, the music industry feels so far away right now. It’s now summer and no shows and more or lesser releases. At the same time, the whole machinery is going on under the surface.

Negotiations are ongoing with new clubs, festivals, and other outlets. The difference is that during the planning we don’t know if it will happen with the dates we are discussing. It will all eventually happen but when?

I guess it is all one's death and the other one's bread. I just recently got several jobs during this crisis. Probably because people that didn’t make it want to move over to another business.  I also think this will be the time where we see who will remain on the stage for a living and who are just there because they think it’s a fun hobby that they just keep up while they work in their ‘real job.’

Lately, I have seen some really smart new things that bigger artists are doing. They just quit the current social media frenzy that has been going on.  I can really see this breaking through as a lifestyle after the pandemic.

For the past ten years record labels, managers and others have told artists that they should own their fans and a lot of the success has been how many followers you have on different social media accounts. Right now it seems like all the bigger labels have a race to pick up things form TikTok. It has been this way in all parts of the music industry with the exception the live scene.

I actually had the time to clean out the old shed that sits in our backyard. That is the last thing you really schedule for a cleanout. I can’t even remember if I have ever cleaned it out when we moved here thirteen years ago.

I also had time to sort out my comic book collection and put the ones of value in plastic sheets. You know when you have time to do things like this, you really have too much time on your hands. Lockdown was not fun, but right now my house looks as best as it ever did; I even had time to build my greenhouse.

But now I feel the isolation time has really gone on too long. I have my projects rolling, many though sit at a standstill because of the holidays. I finally feel kind of bored. I was thinking to myself, why do I feel bored? You have all these small projects that never end, and you are not experiencing any stress. At first, I could not pinpoint what it was. Then it hit me.

Another clickbait headline.Yes, I have been experimenting with things like that. But the whole new world that we see after COVID-19 is starting to be interesting.

I'm in a secret forum with other colleagues in the music industry and there the chatter right now is much how lower Spotify still is in their payment per stream. At the same time, Spotify just launched that you could have one account for two people to the price of one. That will not get more money into Spotify to raise the other. And as many have said the streams are going down during the crisis since people have stopped listening to music to work and from work, since they’re not commuting that much at this time.

Another message from a tech firm that promises me that I can find the next big artists by looking at different numbers on different outlets. Outlets, well they seem more just stats from social media and streaming platforms. As I have written before that is just 25% of the artist's career. It really doesn't give any accurate picture of what is really going on.

Sure, you can get some sales figures from these numbers, at least some pinpoint, but not what is coming, just the past. When the numbers start to reach critical levels someone has already discovered this artist and that is why you have you have those numbers.

I sat in a meeting with quite a few indie labels. It was a crash course on a new play listing tool. Of course, some of the labels started to ask questions about how you pitch to playlists around the world. Because Sweden was not big enough. Also, they complained that it was very hard to get any results.

The labels that really did this, I actually usually receive their press releases since I also work with media and radio. I can easily say that all of their press releases are not in the standard to be brought outside Sweden. They don't contain the right info or the right assets. Of course, they don't get any attention to sending a shitty press release around the world. It doesn't really make any sense. Reality struck me  that they don't have any success in Sweden but they are still blaming the Swedish press and radio for not covering their music and releases. Going abroad will not make it any easier!

That is not what is actually failing. It's the number one fail that 99.9% of the artist do wrong. If you would like to have a chance to be successful you need this!

A good song!

I got a call from a manager that I know on messenger. We usually talk once a week and especially now in the Corona lockdown.

“He dumped me,” was the first thing she said. “After five years he just dumped me!”

I knew exactly who it was, it was her favorite artist that she had been working with for five years. She had told me that the artist had been a bit "off" lately not answering on things and didn't want to take meetings. Still, she thought it was the Corona lockdown that was making the artists depressed.

Now she told me that suddenly she was disconnected as manager from the artist Spotify account, she thought it was odd, but since they weren't releasing anything right now she didn't think much about it. Then she was thrown out as admin on the Facebook page then she knew something was up.

Then she got a short email from the artist saying that he was thinking of releasing in another way now and taking care of his own business.