The Independent: DIY Internet Popstar

30th August 2007

The hammerblow of punk rock struck Britain in 1976, and brought about a Damascene moment for anyone who had ever wielded a guitar, a microphone or a drumstick. You might not have been around at the time, but its impact has echoed down the years; ever since, on a daily basis, the message finally gets through to bands who have spent fruitless months sending “demo tapes” off in padded envelopes to cocaine-addled record company employees while dreaming of a 6-figure record deal. They suddenly realise that CDs and vinyl – just like biros and washing machines – have a manufacturing process, and they don’t need to wait for the music business to give them permission to make a record. They just get on the phone to the factory, and do it by themselves. The effect of this moment is at once thrilling and galvanising.

Thanks to late nights listening to John Peel’s Radio 1 show, my own moment came in 1987; I went on to play in a succession of bands of dubious artistic merit who, in the face of widespread apathy, released our music on our own record labels and never sold more than a couple of hundred copies of each one. But DIY – even the musical kind – is hard work, and I have to admit that it was something of a relief 18 months ago to end up playing keyboards in a much more successful band called Scritti Politti – one of the defining DIY post-punk groups, who secured international success later in their career. But that self-belief that drove me in the 1990s and Scritti in the late 1970s is still thriving amongst bands today – you can’t walk around any British city without encountering someone marching purposefully with a guitar strapped to their back, or hauling a battered amplifier out of a minicab. New technology, and particularly the internet, has placed the means of production and distribution back into the grubby hands of bands in a way that could never have been imagined ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Maybe, I thought, it would be worth having a stab at recording, releasing and promoting a single from the relative comfort of my bedroom in the space of a month. If – and I know this requires some imagination – I turned out to be the next Kate Nash, it might galvanize people with more star-quality than myself into instant action. If not, well, I could continue to proudly wear my hard-earned badge of being truly independent, highly uncompromising and extremely unsuccessful.

First step: get a couple of songs written. Should I make a contrived attempt to appeal to “the kids” and risk looking like an idiot? Or just produce something heavily influenced by the kind of stuff I listen to these days, e.g. Steely Dan, Hall & Oates and The Doobie Brothers? I postponed this decision for a bit. I knew that the recording process was going to be a doddle compared to a decade ago; while you used to fork out a few hundred quid for two days in a grubby backstreet studio, most of these have gone to the dogs because the technology for which they once charged top dollar can now be found inside a cheap laptop with a soundcard and some inexpensive software, such as Apple’s Garageband, or Sony’s Acid Pro. So, after a couple of days of poetic contemplation and musical doodling on my computer, the initial task was pretty much completed. One of the songs, “Those Rules You Made”, told the story of a paranoid bloke who suddenly realises he’s in a relationship with someone who has extremely high standards, but he’s somehow slipped under her radar. It sounded a bit like, well, Steely Dan, Hall & Oates and The Doobie Brothers, and thus – at least to me – like a first-class A-side. The total cost so far: effectively nothing.

Choosing a band name is a nightmare. You ransack your brain, scrawl words on a piece of paper, go to bed, wake up the next day and discover that the best idea you had was something like “Tollund Man”. But I eventually came up with something reasonably arty and sounded like a one-off project: The Schema. I set up a page on the social networking site MySpace, and uploaded the two tracks for the world to hear. I then spent £9.99 on a domain name for my own website – www.theschema.co.uk – and called my friend Dicky to tell him what I was up to. “Called what? The Schemer?” “Oh. Er, no, Schema. With an A.” I’d fallen at the first hurdle: I was trying to promote a band whose name actually needed spelling out to people. I also discovered that searching for “the schema” on Google turned up a load of pages about javascript programming. Brilliant.

There was a big space on my MySpace profile where a picture of the band should go. Reluctant to present my overweight, balding self as the saviour of DIY music, I found an picture of some stick-figure silhouettes on a photo site, istockphoto.com, and paid £2.35 for it. I emailed it to an ex-flatmate, Simon, who has his own design business called Drinkmilk, and in return for £25 he marshalled all his visual skills to tint the image pale green and accompany it with an agreeable font. Back in the old, pre-desktop publishing days, CD manufacturers would bamboozle you with wallet-busting quotes for processes you didn’t understand, such as “origination of camera-ready artwork”, and the record sleeves would always come back looking like a dogs dinner. But this was a piece of cake. I set up my website using the same colour scheme, uploaded the image, and added a tantalising message: Coming Soon – The Schema.

Today’s DIY music scene had its origins in punk, and particularly Manchester band The Buzzcocks, who released their self-financed debut EP – Spiral Scratch – in January 1977. For writer and musician John Robb, then a 16-year old boy living in Blackpool, it was revolutionary. “Before Spiral Scratch, it just never occurred to me that it was possible. It was such a liberating moment. For me, DIY was the most important thing to come out of punk. You felt closer to the artists – most of the record sleeves had been glued together by them! – and getting a band together felt like a swashbuckling adventure.” Green Gartside, aka Scritti Politti, had a similar epiphany. “The realisation was like a bolt from the blue. For me, the inspiration came from an East London band called The Desperate Bicycles. Their debut single in early 1977 had the slogan ‘It Was Easy, It Was Cheap, Go And Do It!’ – and that was the defining moment. From then on, whichever band had the most up-to-date information about making records felt some kind of duty to share it with everyone else.” Indeed, Scritti listed all the costs associated with making their records on the back cover of their first three releases. Maybe I had a similar duty, too. So I set up a blog on my new website, with a rolling list of the costs incurred so far. The current total: £37.34. Easy? Yep. Cheap? Certainly.

Truthfully, my hopes for the success of my single weren’t high. But I found a website called www.hitsongscience.com which mathematically analyses songs for hit potential. The results for “Those Rules You Made” made interesting reading: it scored 7.07 out of 10. Which, apparently, put me in the company of such luminaries as Kasabian, Shakira and Elton John. Chart status almost seemed a formality, now – but I needed get my single into the online stores, and particularly Apple’s iTunes store, which currently sells around 80% of all music that’s bought online. But how? Relevant information on Apple’s website is scarce to non-existent, and if you search on Google for “getting on iTunes”, you end up at third-party sites who deal with Apple on your behalf in return for a percentage cut of receipts. The demand for these services seems enormous; musicians forums are awash with stories of how, with some sites, your music sits in a backlog of unprocessed material and takes over four months to reach the online stores. But a bit of digging uncovered a smaller Glasgow-based operation, emubands.com, that promised to get my 2-track single onto over 170 internet outlets – including iTunes – within four weeks, and all for a flat fee of £24.95.

This seemed too good to be true. I’d had awful experiences of the parallel world of CD distribution; you manufacture as few CDs as the factory will allow – the minimum run is usually 500 – and the distributor, after haranguing you to somehow set up a UK tour and contrive to be reviewed in the NME, might then take 50 of them on sale or return, if you’re lucky. After a couple of months, they generally return all of them to you in the same box you’d delivered them in. Bands all over the country have hundreds if not thousands of their own CDs stored under beds or propping up the TV, filling every conceivable space with a grim reminder of the unmarketability of their music. MP3s, however, occupy no physical space. You don’t have to guess how many you’re going to sell before you start; every download just magics another copy out of the digital ether. Ally Gray, the proprietor of emubands.com, explains his business model. “Traditionally, bands had to beg for distribution and had to somehow prove themselves. But we’re open to absolutely everyone, and we just charge a flat fee for liasing with the stores, getting the tunes online and doing the accounts. We pass on 100% of our receipts from the stores straight to the band – which works out at between 40p and 50p per downloaded track.” After emailing the sound files over to Ally, I got back a confirmation of the release date: 20th August – right on my self-imposed 30-day deadline. This achievement, however, quickly gave way to a grim truth. My MySpace page had been up now for over a week, and its handful of visitors were all, in fact, me sneaking a peek at the page to see if anyone had visited. MySpace and its like are nothing but shop windows, and on the internet no-one comes walking past by accident. It was time to start the horrible process of publicity.

As with any creative effort, the first people you turn to are your friends. I ransacked my email address book and got going; some 500 emails were sent out, urging them to visit MySpace and have a listen. The response was muted, and I got a feeling that the majority of people hadn’t bothered. Meanwhile, on MySpace itself, I was sending messages and adding people as “friends” with gay abandon, but repeatedly hitting the same brick walls. Firstly, people are so sick of bands adding them as friends in a frenzy of self publicity that MySpace has introduced an option that allows them to automatically deny all band friend requests. I’d tried to add current bands whose sound I thought was reasonably similar to mine – such as London’s The Feeling, and French band Phoenix; Phoenix blocked my request, and while The Feeling accepted, they had 82,000 friends already. The likelihood of me being invited round their bass player’s house for a dinner party were pretty slim.

Charlotte Clark, online promotion specialist at PR firm Way To Blue, is frank about the amount of work involved in self-promotion. “If you’re going to make any impact via MySpace, you have to make it your life. If you’re a 5-piece band, you’ve each got to be on there for an hour a day, sending birthday messages to people, building relationships with other bands – it’s really time consuming.” People assume, after reading press stories about the supposed internet-based success of artistes such as the Arctic Monkeys and Sandi Thom, that MySpace alone can somehow lift you into the charts – but Charlotte is quick to dispel this notion. “I firmly believe that no band has ever broken via the internet, and certainly not just through MySpace. Yes, the internet is essential for promoting new acts, but it needs to be combined with other media to make it work.” So, where did that leave me? At this stage, I had two weeks before my single release date to build up a colossal pool of online chums that, according to Charlotte, normally takes around 18 months. I had 200 friends. My page had had 900 views. But 800 of those people might have hated the song, and of the 100 who liked it, perhaps only ten would click through to iTunes and buy it. No, if I was going to flog a few hundred MP3s, I had to reach tens of thousands of people. And fast.

In desperation, I created profiles for The Schema on every social networking site I could find that welcomed upcoming bands with open arms, including Bebo.com, Tagworld.com, and purevolume.com. Over at Garageband.com, I reluctantly paid $19.99 to enter the song into some kind of contest, where bands earn themselves reviews of their own work by reviewing other material and rating it for melody, production values and lyrical flair. It felt like a grim evening class in musicianship; I was informed that my song was “lacking intensity”, although one review did praise the excellent, er, female vocalist. The cheek. But would this translate into sales? Did I really want to appeal to a clique of fellow bedroom artistes? Not really. I paid my friend Alf, who runs a web development company called LikeMind, to build me a Facebook application that could play “Those Rules You Made” to anyone kind enough to add it to their profile; this secured me another 100 listeners. But with ten days to go before release, I was experiencing that familiar feeling of futility. I’d sent mp3s to all the main online music sites – Drowned In Sound, Playlouder, PopJustice and a dozen others – and a clutch of online radio stations, but I was getting no positive feedback. It was pretty much as I thought: there are just so many bands out there, that another new one is almost an irritant, just another flea in the ear of the music industry. On the other hand, maybe I was just being a cheapskate. I’d only spent £97.11 so far – perhaps it was time to throw a bit more money at this thing, and make a video.

Charlotte at Way To Blue had already told me that a video was key to creating promotion opportunities online – not least because of YouTube, where music promos can pick up hundreds of views in the blink of an eye. I’d only ever made one video, in 1990, which involved making a friend’s cat move in time to the music. It was, needless to say, crap. And not only was I lacking experience and creative flair; my video equipment extended to one rather knackered Nokia mobile phone. I appealed via email and my blog, asking if anyone could help – and within a couple of hours a friend sent me the email address of Alex de Campi, a budding American director looking to expand her portfolio. We exchanged emails. She said that she was interested, and – incredibly – she reckoned she could turn it around in just over a week. When we met up, her straight-talking, can-do attitude terrified me; she had already come up with a complete video treatment, combining the paranoid emotions of the protagonist of the song with a meta-commentary on how difficult it is to make a video. But how much would it cost? She promised me that, if she worked for free and succeeded in pulling a huge number of favours, she could probably bring it in for under £500. I pondered. If I’d produced a run of CDs, it would have cost me at least that amount, if not more. Maybe this was the new reality, that a video is where your tiny budget needs to be spent. So, with a deep breath, I said yeah, let’s do it.

The next few days were a blur of storyboards, props, reels of tape and endless messages on Facebook and MySpace pleading for extras to turn up on the day of filming. Alex had earmarked a location: a park near Embankment tube station, as we’d save money on lights by filming it outdoors. The day before the shoot, I peeked nervously at the weather forecast. It was really, really bad. The phone rang - it was Alex. “Bad news,” she said. “What, the weather?” I asked. “Worse. Westminster Council want £300 to let us film there.” All our plans for the video were arranged, and the council had me over a barrel. I was supposed to be funding this myself in the true spirit of DIY, and there was certainly no slush fund available for expenses at The Independent. So the question was: would spending that £300 earn me the 600 MP3 sales that I’d need to cover the extra cost? “But Alex,” I whined, “I might pay them the cash, and then it might rain all day.” “Stop stressing,” she barked. “You’re winding me up. Let me worry about the rain, you worry about the money.” So I bit the bullet. What else could I do?

We arrived at 8am with 2 taxis full of equipment. Alex had managed to find willing, upcoming actors on casting websites to play the various parts, including stern-looking twins, a buxom glamour model, someone from a Steps tribute band, and our lead actor – a young chap called Mark Joseph who had, apparently, been in The Matrix. My internet-sourced extras showed up looking miserable and knackered, but all they had to do was be filmed sitting in deckchairs, reading the newspaper – nothing too arduous. My job: to play the tune from my iPod through a tiny speaker, held up at head height so the actors could mime along. After a ludicrous day of hand jiving, bottle smashing and fending off the local vagrants, Alex was able to say “It’s a wrap” just before 4pm. We’d done it in 8 hours – and the rain had held off. “Now the hard work starts,” said Alex – she had 48 hours to turn this into a coherent promotional video.

She stayed up all night on the day the single was released, tweaking the clips and adding effects so we’d have something to put up on YouTube. When I woke up the next morning, there was an email from her: “It’s up. I go die/sleep now.” I went to have a look; I was the 16th person to watch it. She’d done a brilliant job – it was funny, it complemented the song beautifully, it was packed with friends of mine looking slightly self-conscious - I was really proud of it. I did another big emailout and another blog entry urging people to watch it and tell their friends to do the same. By lunchtime, it was going down well; It had received 650 views, and had become the 64th “most favourited” video in the UK that day. Then, at some point during the afternoon, the YouTube editors noticed it was picking up plays, and - god bless them - they stuck it on the front page. At this point, things went ballistic. By the end of the working day, we’d had 6,000 views and a string of positive comments. By the time I went to bed, we’d had 25,000 views and were the most-watched music video in the UK that day. By the next morning, it was up to 64,000. And then, at around 6pm on Thursday 23rd August, “Those Rules You Made” became – and I still can’t quite believe this – YouTube’s most watched music video in the world over the previous 24 hours, with 67,500 views. I even received an interview request from an Argentinian newspaper. This was success way beyond what Alex and myself could ever have hoped. But, while ravaged with excitement, at the back of my mind, I was wondering whether anyone had actually gone and bought the thing.

We had to wait until yesterday to to get sales figures from Ally at Emubands.com. By this point, almost a quarter of a million people had watched the video, and for a brief period we’d edged out Linkin Park and become YouTube’s number three music video during that week; the chart rundown looked hilarious, with one solitary, valiant DIY effort amid a sea of swanky major label productions for the likes of Foo Fighters, Pharrell Williams and Enrique Iglesias. At midday, the total sales for that the previous week finally arrived in my email inbox. There’s no easy way of writing this, so I’ll just write it: 58. And for the avoidance of doubt: fifty-eight. This news was, on a personal level, a bit deflating. My total costs, including the £300 for Westminster Council, had come to around £870. My total receipts would be about £27. Extrapolate these figures to the industry as a whole, and you can see why the boardrooms are in crisis; even taking into account that my record might just be a bit rubbish, 58 sales out of a quarter of a million YouTube views provides undeniable proof of both the fleeting nature of internet success, and the reluctance of the public to spend money on pop music. I broke the news to Alex; it was her video, after all, that had brought my song to so many people. “Bah,” she texted back, grumpily. “Nobody actually pays for music anymore, do they?” Mm. Maybe that’s just how it is. So maybe I was being needlessly downhearted. There was my own artistic fulfilment to consider, after all. I might be out of pocket, but a quarter of a million people had heard my song. And, to paraphrase the Desperate Bicycles: It was fairly easy. And it would have been cheap, had it not been for Westminster Council. So hey – why not just go and do it anyway?