Faced with a global slump in album sales and the not-unconnected problem of illegal downloading, they’ve embarked on an increasingly desperate search for the industry’s new Holy Grail … a business model that can make money from music while accommodating the iPod generation’s unwillingness to pay for it. It’s a circle that can’t easily be squared, though there have been some imaginative attempts to date.
In July 2007, Prince gave away his new album Planet Earth free with a Sunday newspaper. It was intended as an appetiser for the following month’s 21-night residency at London’s 20,000 capacity O2 Arena. The concerts generated over £13 million in ticket sales alone.
A few months later, Radiohead ‘leaked’ their new album In Rainbows onto the internet, asking fans to pay only what they thought it was worth. Over one million people coughed up something. The deluxe vinyl version, released two months later, went on to become the best-selling release of 2008 … and that in a vinyl market in which sales rose 89% on the previous year.
Next weekend, the Kingdom of Fife enters the story when King Creosote – also known as 43-year-old musician Kenny Anderson – performs at Anstruther’s Homegame festival. Anderson isn’t a rock superstar but, like Prince, he’s giving away a free album and performing a series of connected live shows. The difference is that his audience will have to record this album for themselves.
Now in its seventh year, Homegame is organised by Fence Records, the label Anderson founded in the mid-1990s and which he now runs with fellow musician Johnny Lynch. Together they are part of a wider community of musicians known as the Fence Collective.
Over the three days of the Homegame festival, Anderson will perform a new King Creosote album seven times, with each concert featuring different versions and arrangements of the 10 songs. The album’s working title is My Umpteenth Bit Of Strange.
All ticket holders have been asked to come armed with a means of recording the concert. They will be denied entry if they don’t. Then they will be asked to disseminate their live recordings any way they want. Vitally, the album itself will not be released as a studio recording. At least not yet.
In part, Anderson is doing this to draw attention to the problems of illegal downloading. When he released his album King Creosote Rules OK in 2005, his record company estimated that for every copy sold there were three illegal copies made. By the time of his 2007 album, Bombshell, that number had increased threefold.
“It’s totally out of control. Around 95% of all music downloads now are illegal.”
But Anderson aims to make free downloading work in his favour. Instead of releasing an album, he’s banking one. He hopes that by restricting supply of it to these “field recordings” he can build audiences for his live performances and increase the appetite for a future studio recording. By then he’ll also know which version of the songs have proved the most popular.
“I do intend to record these songs but they’re not getting released until I feel I’ve played my hand,” he says. “It’ll be the last King Creosote album but the only version people will have of it until then is the live songs. So when the album does arrive, it might have a chance of charting.”
It’s one way to try to square a circle.
