My Favourite Record Store.

My favourite record store is a short walk from the office. It lies fixed, 'twixt an old-people's café and an after-work pub. It has been there forever, and feels like it will be forever still. It exists only in my hometown, and it is named after one of my favourite bands. It devotes its basement - as large as the store itself - to vinyl, and on Wednesday afternoon it packs that vinyl away to let bands run loose and play loud. For quite some time, it seemed to be staffed entirely by this town's best musicians. Now I'm a little older, and the place seems to be staffed entirely by my personal friends.

My favourite record store displays that Nick Hornby quote atop one of its two newfangled registers. You know the one. "Yes, yes, I know. It's easier to download music, and probably cheaper. But what's playing on your favourite download store when you walk into it? Nothing, that's what. Who are you going to meet in there? Nobody. Where are the notice boards offering flatshares and vacant slots in bands destined for superstardom? Who's going to tell you to stop listening to that and start listening to this? Go ahead and save yourself a couple of quid. The saving will cost you a career, a set of cool friends, musical taste and, eventually, your soul. Record stores can't save your life. But they can give you a better one." And I do believe that I owe my favourite record store my life; at least, my life as I have lived it. But even Hornby would walk into the store now and cringe.

My favourite record store never seems to carry my favourite records. There was a time when it could be relied upon, but that time is no longer. Have you got the new album? Oh, we did, says my favourite record store. But it has sold out. Really? Already? Well, we only ordered three copies. It's a shame, because I wanted one too. (They never reordered.) My favourite record store does still carry tickets to the shows I want to see, but they sold off their small ticketing agency to the interstate competitor. Now I can only buy tickets when their computers are working, for whatever fee the bastards want to charge.

You see, my favourite record store is running out of money. Downloads, they say. Competition from the majors. And it is true - all of my favourite records, bar none, are available from the giant chain store down the road. You know, the giant chain store which only opened three years ago, the one which is so big it can afford to import five copies of that strange folk album that was never released here, on one person's suggestion, only to then give them away on sale for next to nothing. But that's not the point.

I want to have a favourite record store. I want to have a record store that inspires me to buy records, that leads me down its own paths, that actively glimpses into that better life. I want to find a band, then go to my favourite record store and be able to spend a week's wages on their entire discography. Then I want to have the staff write little notes on the CD covers suggesting other bands I might like. I want to get to know the staff, even if I don't ever talk to them, by their notes and their recommendations, get to know them on taste. Because that's what the chain store can never have - it can have everything, in droves and sold cheap, but it can never claim taste.

My favourite record store is dying, and a little part of me is dying with it.

Singsongs.

Two years ago, Rickard Falkvinge, a Swede working for Microsoft, quit his job to establish the Piratpartiet: the Pirate Party. As its name suggests, the Piratpartiet is a single-issue party based around the issue of piracy, and in particular, encouraging legislation to decriminalise file sharing. At the 2006 election, it secured 35 000 votes in the Riksdag; not enough to win a seat, but enough to mark its place on the electoral landscape. Like any advocacy party, the Piratpartiet need not actually win a seat to pursue its agenda. Its electoral legitimacy - the potential for it to gain more votes in a subsequent election, away from the mainstream parties - gives it traction. Whether or not as a result of this traction, two days ago the Left Party reversed its support for anti-piracy laws, joining the Greens and the Centre Party.

Pirating copyright reform (On Line Opinion)
Left Party supports file sharing (The Local)

Of course, sharing of music was occurring long before the advent of broadband Internet. When I was a youngster rationing my pocket money, all I needed to do was borrow my favourite CDs from the public library, and then make a copy that would last me a lifetime. (I am still yet to own a copy of Nirvana's Nevermind.) File sharing has exacerbated a problem, of course, but exactly what is that problem?

The problem is that people are spending less money on CDs, and pay-per-file downloads are so clumsy that they are never going to reclaim that ground. There are two groups of people who are significantly disadvantaged as a result: record labels, and high-earning artists. When Metallica's Lars Ulrich successfully sued Napster, he wasn't just spoiling a party. Metallica is a highly profitable business able to attract a seemingly endless slew of new, young fans whose natural obsessiveness encourages them to spend every cent of their pocket money on the band's entire back catalogue. However, these kids are also fickle enough to not care greatly about the band's tactile art, and are unlikely to be interested in having the tangible package for its own sake. In the post-Napster world, one click and they're done.

Metallica, however, is in the minority. Those musicians whose work is entirely an artistic product and who attract a small but nerdy audience - Shellac, for example - will continue to sell their old albums on 180-gram, 12" vinyl. Bands who continue to release albums with relevance and vitality, such as Radiohead, can take advantage of the new distribution technology to actually increase their profitability.

The initial argument that less money on CDs will result in less music being produced is, as it turns out, absolute garbage. The myspace world gives us access to more music than ever before, more-than-occasionally of exceptional quality. So what is actually happening here?

Well, the same technology that makes file-sharing cheap and easy enough to destroy the music industry is also making recording cheap and easy enough to save it. Any fool with a computer can spend a few hundred dollars on a studio-quality microphone and record an album to match any commercial masterpiece. And they do: several of my favourite albums of last year, including El Perro Del Mar's amazing debut, were self-recorded.

(Trailblazers of this tradition were managing it in the 1980s: Big Black, for example, followed in the 1990s by Sebadoh and Elliott Smith. Electronic music then dominated the self-recording world, and with records such as Air's Moon Safari, it was well worth it.)

Many of the most prolific studios are housed in sheds or lounge rooms. Almost any band able to extract a sizeable record label advance - Radiohead, Wilco, dEUS, etc. - will no longer spend the money going to Abbey Road. They'll simply buy enough gear to build their own Abbey Road, wherever they like.

The effect of mass-file-sharing will not be the end of good-quality music - it will be the end of commercial monopoly. Over the last sixty years, a handful of large record labels has worked in concert with a handful of commercial radio stations to limit most listeners to only a handful of artists each year. The money they made from this was then spent 'finding' their next key artist; spending thousands of dollars buying the songs and the producers to make a 'quality' record; then spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing. Now the days of A&R tyranny are numbered.

The major labels are hitting back through the one medium which is still both popular and monopolised: television. Idol shows are simply easy ways for a major label to remain profitable through democracy.

For the rest of us, it is exceptionally cheap to record an album - once you have the basic gear, the unit cost per record is practically nothing. As for the distribution of music, and the potential of making a living out of it, the options there are opening wide.

I have spent the last six years writing music articles for independent magazines. For the last two years, I've been contributing to a magazine in a foreign city, having been recommended by a former home-town colleage. Two weeks ago, that colleague switched employment - as a result, I now write for a magazine whose entire staff are strangers to me. I realise that the days of getting 'care packages' consisting of new albums by Low, Arcade Fire, The Decemberists and The Hold Steady, for no reason whatsoever, are gone. I need to find another way.

And so I have come, belatedly, to blogs. There are an amazing amount of music blogs around, offering great diversity in taste, opinion, language and geography. Blogs can also support new distribution techniques. Denovali Records, a small Swedish label, offers downloads in lieu of attracting support for their operations. On the downloads page for French post-rock/metal band Celeste, is the following message:

" we have started the preorder for the new CELESTE - NIHILISTE(S) CD/LP to gain some money in order to pay for the pressing. But since you probably would not like to preorder a record you haven't listened to before, we have decided to make the full album available for download from our side. we support downloading music, especially as a way of getting to know unknown releases. But of course we are also record lovers, so if you want to be our personal heroes, you can preorder the record and help us releasing it faster."

Music can be art. Art can be loved. Money will still change hands - fair pay for fair art. File sharing may just open music up to the people, and allow mass audiences to be more discerning, and have more investment - financial and otherwise - in the music to which they listen. In the meantime, go searching - you'll be surprised at what you find.

The Adventures of Humble Bee.

Easter Saturday 2008: Humble Bee plays its first show, to an enthusiastic if perplexed crowd of friends and various associates. Its two members decide that, seeing as how they've now made the transition from wooden toy to real boy, they should offer all of their recordings to the world, and offer proper, respectable press releases. Here, then, is a first draft of a real, sensible biography of Humble Bee.

February 2007: At a small gig in a tiny venue, Ben, frontman of noise-pop act Meanwell College, escapes the racket and retreats to the beer garden. There he is introduced to various friends of friends, including a shy stranger called Carly.

April 2007: Ben and Carly continue to see each other throughout various places and times, brought together by a mutual acquaintance - for the moment, let us call him he - who, for varied and different reasons, is starting to give both of them the shits.

May 2007: A conversation occurs between Ben and Carly, which goes a little something like this:

Carly: You know, you should really write a song about him.
Ben: That would be hilarious. Although, it would make him rather too proud. Besides, he didn't really do anything to me. You know, you should really write a song about him.
Carly, cheekily: Well, maybe I will.

Later that week, Carly sends Ben an e-mail with the words to Perfect On Paper. Ben, bored and curious, begins the process of twisting guitar parts together, and using his incredible microphone abilities records the song and sends it back.

June 2007: Carly eventually records her lead vocal, takes it home, and creates a myspace page. She uses the name Humble Bee, which she reclaims from her previous, unreleased musical efforts. Seeing as he knew about the old Humble Bee, it would be easy to expect him to discover a Humble Bee myspace attached to Carly's own, and from there hear her scathing, vicious (but still cute and chirpy) song.

Yet, if he did discover Humble Bee that way, he decided to keep all of his thoughts to himself.

July-August 2007: Ben travels through Europe, occasionally stopping by Internet cafés to keep in touch with the outside world. By the end of his journey, he has received two more song/poems from Carly.

November 2007: Ben finally decides to get around to recording music for the next two songs, and they appear on the Humble Bee myspace. Carly finally gives him their myspace password.

December 2007: Ben and Carly sit in the beer garden of yet another cosy establishment, where Ben lets slip to new musical friends that the two of them are "in a band". Carly laughs so hard she nearly spills her drink. The others actually take them seriously, add Humble Bee as online pseudo-friends, and begin to talk about gigs. On New Year's Eve, Ben is actually introduced to someone as "Ben from Humble Bee."

January-March 2008: Despite this new attention, Humble Bee lies silently still, without doing or saying anything. Perhaps they were waiting in the darkness for a clear approach to attack; more likely, they were slack and careless and harboured no ambition whatsoever. More people, however, find the band, and all strangely assume that it is more than just a musical wooden toy created for their own quite nasty amusement.

In the meantime, he begins again to talk to Carly. In one angry conversation, he quotes lines from Perfect On Paper. Ben's and Carly's original mission is complete.

March 2008: The headlining band pulls out of the first ever Wish, an indie night at Producers' Bar featuring bands, DJs, videos and, given the season, the Easter Bunny. Rather than attract a new headliner, the event's organisers genuinely, seriously and fearlessly approach Ben and Carly as an opening act. At 11.30pm on a Friday night, Carly calls Ben, possibly wondering how they can get out of it. Ben, already quite drunk, instead insists that it will be fine, they can totally play a show in eight days' time, and to accept with glee.

This despite the fact that Humble Bee had only three songs, and that despite their recording prowess, Ben and Carly had never played a song in the same room at the same time, ever. Ben and Carly finally gather around, and in the space of one week write two more songs from scratch, record, and rehearse three full times. Carly begins to play glockenspiel, something neither of them had any idea how to do.

22 March 2008: In the face of adversity, Humble Bee's first ever performance is a rolling success.

To Be Continued. (Hopefully.)


Humble Bee on myspace: http://www.myspace.com/humblebeecarly. Humble Bee will be playing Popsicle at the Edinburgh Castle, Friday 6 June.

Songs for Simians, volume 1.

Over the last few years, the good folk at All Tomorrow's Parties have been spending a presidential-campaign-load of money convincing independent music's most influential bands to reform, and go on small tours playing just one album from start to finish. In only a few weeks the ATP crowd has convinced Low ('Things We Lost In The Fire' - also see this), Sonic Youth ('Daydream Nation'), The Scientists ('Blood Red River'), and Died Pretty ('Doughboy Hollow') to tour Australia. They have also convinced My Bloody Valentine to reform, for the first time in 16 years, and tour the UK. All very good things.

But I've got another plea: rather than get a seminal band to play a seminal album, can we please, please try to convince people to come together just to perform one song?

Exhibit a: Kristin Hersh and Michael Stipe, Your Ghost, 1993.

Sure, we could make it part of a superb bill, wherein Throwing Muses reform to play House Tornado, and Bill Berry rejoins REM to play Document. But please let these two people come together to play this one stunning, beautiful, harrowing song, and please let me be there.

Other candidates: PJ Harvey and Thom Yorke, Youssou N'Dour and Neneh Cherry...