How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (63 page)

What the mainstream media had also failed to spot was the fact that the band were being much discussed and shared on the Internet. Although the band had released only one 7-inch single, many of the crowd in the Astoria were already singing along to the words of every song. In a search for a narrative, the press labelled Arctic Monkeys ‘The first MySpace band’.

‘It wasn’t MySpace,’ says Bell. ‘It was file sharing and it was
word of mouth. It was on the first level of Internet insanity. The kids were swapping it, and that was just going on independently – it wasn’t a MySpace thing. The band had given away demos of these songs, they’d made ten CDRs of their songs, taken them to sell at gigs and had a couple of beers and given them away. It was on The Others’ forum that the Monkeys were blowing up, it was in that post-Libertines moment. It was also something up in the north as well; the ownership was there for the fans, because they kept out of London and the media hadn’t introduced them and it was outside of all that.’

The Others were one of the handful of bands that had landed a record deal by using the Libertines’ tactics of guerrilla gigs and posting their music online. Although their career was short, they were representative of the new energies and expectations surrounding young bands: to interact with the public away from the established media and to communicate directly with their fans and peers via the Internet, where such activity could be formalised on a band’s official MySpace site. The Arctic Monkeys, however, had ignored MySpace until after their debut album was released.

‘It’s a complete myth, because that’s media trying to explain it after the fact,’ says Dyer. ‘It’s like a journalist trying to intellectualise house music … “House music’s moved on.” “Why, what do you mean, what’s it done?” “It’s progressed, it’s progressive house.” So media thought, “Oh, hang on, MySpace has come into the public consciousness, people are communicating via MySpace – oh, hang on, MySpace must have created the Arctic Monkeys.” It became a hoover-vacuum-type phrase to describe the arrival of music being spread around the net.’

The forthcoming Arctic Monkeys album had generated sufficient interest for HMV to take the unusual step of issuing a press release. The retailer announced that it was anticipating
record sales, enough to make
Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not
the fastest-selling debut album on record. As an example of the light-speed with which new music was now being consumed in an instant fix, the statement and the record caught the public imagination.

‘I was halfway down the touchline watching my son play football,’ says Dyer. ‘There was a guy down the touchline from me who runs Reuters news, media division, and he’d got the vibe. He’d heard about it, and he came up to me three times, and says, “I’d like to do a news spike on the Arctic Monkeys, can you get me access?” The Sky News ticker was running it as a story. It was a moment in time that acknowledged the end of a marketing age and the arrival of a consumer-driven age. You couldn’t plan for it, you couldn’t market for it, it was entirely of its own momentum.’

Whatever Arctic Monkeys’ relationship with the Internet or MySpace, one thing was becoming increasingly evident; the days of a record like
Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not
succeeding on such a large scale were drawing to an end. Illegal downloading and file sharing were becoming ubiquitous and, for a younger audience, the most popular way of consuming music. Record sales became decimated by the advance in new technologies and the music industry entered into a period of terminal decline.

To the independents, who had always been forced to operate on tight margins and be sensitive to the headwinds of the market, the major labels’ response seemed both ignorant and, possibly, fatal. Rather than move into partnership with tech companies to adjust to the digital age, the majors resorted to lobbying and litigation.

‘They had all that time and all that money, and they just couldn’t put their egos aside and get together and find a solution to just cook up digital distribution,’ says Bell. ‘They could’ve
owned Napster and have the brand name that everybody could go to, and do what iTunes did. Instead, they lost the means of distribution to iTunes and they just sat there and let it all roll out and then they just lost everything.’

From his vantage point at EMI Publishing, Mike Smith was well placed to see the industry’s response and, like Bell, realised that the decisions being taken by the major record companies were short-termist and ill considered. ‘As a publisher you’re sort of sat on the sidelines, screaming about the opportunity that was being missed by the major labels. They couldn’t work out a proper direction and had to be led by the nose by iTunes to do it. When BMG [Bertelsmann Music Group] bought Napster, that was an opportunity for the whole of the music industry to buy into it all and have a very legitimate online service. Instead, the whole music industry banded together and shut it down. So many opportunities were lost.’

Another factor apart from the Internet would start to work against the independent sector; the major labels had surrendered valuable sales in a shrinking business to a sector they had not long ago dismissed. If ‘indie’ was once again popular and profitable then they needed a share in its market.

Pete Thompson ran the distribution company Vital that handled the majority of accounts for the independents. Thompson had been at the frontline of independent distribution since his teens, having started at Red Rhino, the northern component in The Cartel. From the optimism and
decentralisation
of The Cartel to its chaotic bankruptcy, through to the indie-manqué of Britpop and the resurgence of guitar music in the 2000s, Thompson had witnessed the independent sector’s varying fortunes. ‘Whether it was the Strokes, the White Stripes, Bloc Party, Maximo Park, Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys,’ he says, ‘they were all on independent labels. It was
genuinely coming from the indies and the majors weren’t going to fucking take that lying down were they? They were going to react in exactly the way you’d expect the majors to react which is, “Don’t let the indies sign anybody.”’

As the majors stared to sign second- and third-division guitar bands – many of whom were bedecked in either Strokes skinny jeans and ties or polo shirts with upturned collars in the style of Arctic Monkeys – a surplus of tired, functional guitar-
music-by
-numbers was relentlessly released and marketed as the next big thing. The results were dismissed as ‘landfill indie’, one of the most ignominious phrases to ever contain the troubled word. It was a description that accurately and wittily captured the meaningless attempts at style over content with which an endless procession of four-piece bands embarked on their often very short-term careers.

‘You’ve got no independent labels signing bands,’ says Thompson. ‘You’ve got majors signing a load of bands that they don’t really fucking want anyway. You’re left with an independent sector that has XL, Domino, Wichita, Rough Trade, Beggars and Warp doing their stuff, and very little else, nothing coming up.’

By 2006 Martin Mills had celebrated nearly thirty years at the head of Beggars Banquet. His Beggars Group had a string of international offices and now counted 4AD, XL, Rough Trade and the Rough Trade East record shop in London among its concerns. Mills also chaired AIM, the Association of Independent Music, a trade body set up to defend the sector’s interests, making him something of a father figure and counsel for independence. Having weathered all the highs and lows of remaining outside the major-label music business, Mills had always maintained a pragmatic optimism about the independent sector’s future. ‘The majors are fundamentally about control,’ he says. ‘There was a
period when they let enough control slip through their fingers for us to flourish, and a lot of that goes down to the control of the distribution. God bless Geoff for having been around there in the beginning and having taken control out of the hands of the majors. But you can see the majors trying to claw it back and I fear a world in which they have managed to get back into control of distribution.’

There is also a home truth about the independent music business that is inescapable.

‘It’s always down to money isn’t it?’ says Mills. ‘If you’re doing this and you haven’t got money problems, then you’re doing something wrong.’

In the concert halls and bars of the East End of London, or Williamsburg, or Berlin or any metropolitan city centre, it is hard to understand that the music business is undergoing a difficult and prolonged period of fundamental readjustment as it comes to terms with the realities of a digital future. The venues are full of bands, artists, DJs and audiences, many with a passion for and knowledge of music as strong and deep as any of their predecessors. The diminishing costs of recording and distributing music, together with an international framework and media for music of every genre, mean that, in many ways, there has never been a better time to be working in music. However, to turn these opportunities into the kind of careers (or anti-careers) enjoyed by many of the subjects of this book is becoming harder.

‘All bands want is to look good and be cool, and have some nice people around them whilst making as much money as possible,’ says Mark Bowen. Having worked at Creation during the years of Oasis mania, he left to start a label in his bedroom, and has the broadest possible perspective. ‘It’s a really hard thing to do. You have to choose: you can be on some kind of really small indie,
or you can be on Polydor. One of them’s going to sell you tons of records and the other one’s going to be your mate, but it’s a really, really hard line to walk, one that’s almost impossible to get right. That’s why we still talk about the only ten or so labels able to do it – the Factories, the Rough Trades and a handful of others.’