This is an interview taken from the research The Online Music Economy for Independent Music Entrepreneurs.

Robin Junga is an independent music producer, engineer, musician and music educator based in Nottingham and a founding member of electronic band amillionsons.  I spoke to Robin in March 2009 to find out more about his views of the rapidly changing music economy and his experiences in working with Nottingham hip-hop community.

Susi O’Neill: Robin, could you tell me briefly about your experiences as a musician and working in music?

Robin Junga: Studio, keyboard, producer, musician – signed, releasing, charting.  Then a lot of education in music technology alongside of that.

SO: Do you have a digital presence?

RJ: Yes, we have the studio – Sirkus, my mastering – noizskulpta and we have a MySpace as amillionsons, there’s a certain amount of banter that goes on and a certain amount of remix work comes in through there or DJs looking for stuff who want to play our stuff.

Amillionsons is a project we’ve had going on for some time, we had some success with and managing to chart in the UK with it, got rave reviews for album that sold about 1,000 copies because it was on a then independent label.

We were on London [Records, part of Warner Brothers] first, Pete Tong was our A&R, everyone wanted that particular single, then we didn’t like that experience.  They got the marketing wrong.  They split their marketing by a week because they announced the wrong release date – all sorts of incompetent stuff.  So we saw that it was just a bank at the end of the day so we went with an independent label, Shiva, a boutique label, for the album.  No marketing budget but great reviews.

SO: How would you compare your experiences working with a large indie stroke subsidiary of a major and an indie boutique, as an artist what was the difference?

RJ: Well the boutique label was so close at a street level, you’re in direct phone contact, it’s a one, two man operation.  The benefits are the connections, the connectivity. The downside is the lack of budget and marketing spend, it’s very hit and miss, you can’t throw anything at them because they’ve no budget to do anything.  The downsides of the majors is they were just as incompetent, from my experiences over the years they just haven’t got a clue what’s going on.

SO: If you were to release something now, which route do you think you’d go down?

RJ: We’ve got a record ready to go, we might go through Shiva still, we’ve still got an association with them, we might just put it straight up.  It might not be a release in any other sense that ‘here you go, you can download it here’.  What does a release mean now?  Does it mean it’s on vinyl or CD?  Well it doesn’t have to be now, nobody’s buying that stuff.  I know that’s not happening.  I’ve been mastering some of the emerging stuff in the UK and hip-hop scene at the moment and it’s had rave reviews everywhere but it’s sold less than a 1,000 CDs.

SO: Do you think some of the releases you’ve worked on for labels have been loss making?

RJ: Absolutely, the majority of them recently.  The whole thing’s had to restructure – absolutely radically.

SO: Have the business models of your clients changed dramatically?

RJ: Absolutely on its head, in the last 18 months from when the majors a couple of years ago starting changing their contracts to management-style contracts which they didn’t have any experience in, and struggled really badly with and lost out to the digital aggregators ultimately.  From Madonna signing with Live Nation, there was the writing on the wall, people refused to believe it then suddenly all the distributors are bankrupt.   Cargo is the only big independent one left and they’ve managed to keep in step with the digital world, I think they take the digital aggregation very seriously and are partners in it with online stores as well.

SO: What is you attitude towards music ownership?  Presumably you grew up like me an era of tape-swapping, and vinyl later moving onto CD.

RJ: Yes.  Interesting, because as a professional audio person as well as a musician, that’s not necessarily the case, increasingly in this world there’s an overlap, the quality of CDs really grabbed me but the experience of buying them is nowhere near as good as the vinyl with the art, it was a statement.  So right now I’ve kept all my CDs because of this quality issue, but if I knew that I had it all at a reasonable bit rate, and didn’t need to go backtracking, so I have my reason for them.  The digital format is far superior because I can find it quick, I can say ‘right I want to hear this’, then it’s there.

I’ve got a pretty big iTunes library in my laptop, I don’t use a pod, I can use my phone, I do occasionally when I’m on a journey but it’s not when I go to work.  As a musician I don’t actually listen to other people’s music as much as passionate consumers especially if I’m working on music at that time, I don’t feel the need just want to get out in the garden. I have an odd ambivalence with it really. But the digital format is far better – the MP3 format is neither here nor there, my base format is a 192Kb M4A – the M4A s sound far better than a MP3.  That’s what I use for my clients, it’s reasonable. It’s far, far more convenient.  In terms of ownership, when something is on your computer you own it.  Where you’ve acquired it from, legally or not, is a different matter.

As an artist, who does pay for it? I don’t know.  The models are changing completely, once Pinnacle [independent distributors] went under, that’s the death of physical copies.  Vinyl as a niche will exist for a long time because the jocks like it, and because it has that kudos.  But physical copies as a sales medium – it doesn’t exist now, it’s not dying, it’s gone. So I know that the artists I work with are increasingly not doing any releases.  It’s all about getting money from gigs.

SO: One of the limitations has been that independent distributors will take less stock, they’ll only take what they know they can shift and sell, which limits consumer choice at a retail level, which aggravates the problem of consumers not having anything they want to buy in shops.

RJ: Those taste making consumers have got round that, by the online Warp records store and things like that, that’s where people are sourcing their cutting-edge releases from.  The stuff from the underground are coming through a very small clique sub-set of online resellers who don’t hold stock necessarily.

The magazines and paper press have pretty much gone.  The online magazines and the online kudos boutique retailers are merging in a sense, the links are so close, to get yourself in a boutique like Warp they have to select you, there’s a quality assurance that they’ve selected you.  So there’s a review process going on, that’s what I mean by the blurring with magazines.

SO: Would you say MP3 blogs were crucial to the taste-making process?

RJ: Yes, the whole viral thing, that’s the model that anyone who’s anyone is using.  How strategic it is and how accidental it is, who knows, but it’s all about MP3s and blogs and YouTubes and whatever viral nonsense you can put up.  One of the label’s I’m working with have lined up some guerrilla urban- art strategies – I can’t disclose the details but innovative and on a big scale.

SO: Like a publicity stunt?

RJ: It’s viral – it’s borderline legality.  So that kudos about keeping things close to the edge of legality was always an important part of underground music, it still is, especially with the hip-hop and urban stuff.

SO: Are a lot of your client small indies in the hip-hop scene?

RJ: My main connections are with independent hip-hop, one label in particular Dealmaker Records and stuff around that.

SO: Are the artists you work with based mainly in Nottingham or all around the world?

RJ: They have international clients, it’s focused in Nottingham but many live in London and elsewhere and there are some international artists going on, it’s a local hub.

SO: You mentioned things have changed a lot in the last 18 months, why do you think that is?  What are the survival tactics your clients are adopting?

RJ: It’s been forced because literally the collapse of Pinnacle stunned everyone, “shit this isn’t going to work, forget it”, they were sort of toying with digital, not toying with it, digital was always important, but they were still trying to do real copies, and normal real copy CDs.  The two boutiques that I can think of directly abandoned the idea, they said right well unless we’re going to do a 20 page booklet with some crazy expensive artwork and a limited edition CD run, they’re not going to do any.  So it’s all only boutique, speciality niche, collector’s items and digital.  That’s the strategy until the tipping point.  It’s been forced, there’s no choice – when a company’s going down with thousands of pounds worth of your stock and you’re un-insured, well actually digital stock can’t go down.

SO: Would you say it’s the nature of distribution and retail going bad that’s forced artists into new business models?

RJ: Bad is an interesting word, there’s been a sea change in people’s attitudes, a totally ambivalent attitude, most people believe that music should be paid for but most people steal it.  Call it Napster or whatever, but there’s been a sea change in the way that people consume music. The artists’ themselves do it and have the same ambivalence.

SO: Do you mean sampling?

RJ: Well that’s another layer of it for sure, but artists as consumers do it, even though they know how hard they work, they still steal other people’s music.  From a sampling point of view, having had an album that sampled The Simpsons, Muhammad Ali, The Doors, and god knows what else, the recycling is part of music, you’re on the shoulders of other people before you.  Hip-hop in particular takes that, I don’t personally see the problem, a lot of people now don’t see the problem with work being sampled, they’re quite honoured.  It was always the suits in the middle have the problem and wanted to suppress it, so I think attitudes have changed certainly amongst that generation of musicians.  What is a sample, is it a note or a chunk of someone else’s stuff?

SO: I’m sure you remember in the ‘80s the ‘home taping is killing music’ arguments which are being reiterated with bit-torrenting and peer-to-peer.  Do you see a distinct difference between attitudes now streaming MP3s and the arguments about tape sharing in the ‘80s?

RJ: No, it’s fundamentally the same, as a kid why would it flag on your radar, you want the music, it’s all about the culture you’re immersed in, so I don’t think it’s any different, it’s the same argument but this time the argument means something.  It’s not killing music, music is in a sense the healthiest it’s ever been arguably. The amount of it and the ability of it to break through without the major label stranglehold while they throw half a million, two million at one artist and nothing at a thousand others. The problem is that no one gets an income from it, unless you’re sync licensing (adverts, films, TV), so sync becomes really important. There’s artists out there with syncs but no ‘releases’.  I was introduced to one recently, they’ve got two big adverts but they’ve never released a record formally, they’ve only ever had stuff on MySpace.

SO: Do you think the circle squares for the artist you work with in terms of losing income from CDs and distribution and gaining it from new markets and new business models and live work?  Would you say artists were richer or poorer than they were two or three years ago?

RJ: There’s a lot more artists visible and there’s a lot less money from sales in the system.  There’s a lot more for love and if you don’t have a live base you don’t have an income at the moment really.  I was talking to Chris Todd from Crazy P last night, they’re quite a successful band, they’ve got a big following in Australasia.   He said they get their money from DJing and gigs, and they’ve had some pretty decent syncs.

SO: Is he on an independent label?

RJ: Yes, KRJ1– I saw them play to two-and-a-half, three thousand people at KoKo recently – so they’re at a level they can sustain the monies but they’re not generating money from sales.

SO: But they are sustaining themselves from live and merchandising – is that part of the strategy?

RJ: I think it probably is. The band are getting paid and there’s enough in it for them to keep going but they’re certainly not rolling in it. And that has radically changed, the amount of press for some of the stuff that I’ve worked on recently, with that press, only a few years ago, you’d have been guaranteed 10,000 sales, and now you’re coming up with 850 CDs sales.

SO: When would you say that tectonic shift happened?

RJ: It’s very recent, since the credit squeeze, whatever nonsense is going out in the big wide world economically.  I don’t know how closely it’s linked because it was going before that.  This has just forced the situation incredibly quickly.

SO: Do you think the major labels, who account for 75 percent plus of record sales around the world, have had a crucial role in the recent collapse of music retail?

RJ: Absolutely, they didn’t know what to do with anything other than the model’s that they’d got.  They tried to solve it with management-style contracts and I don’t think that’s worked.  I don’t think they’re majors anymore – they’re not major players.  They are corporate, the Maccie-Dees… no one I know listens to any music that’s on a major.

SO: Is that because the market outlets, like BBC Radio, Capital Radio, major newspapers and magazines are less significant than five years ago when they were the dominant media?

RJ: I think there’s been a bit of a schism.  Growing up being into my new wave, post-punk, Joy Division stuff, there was always a snobbery about the soul boy stuff.  Whatever manufactured meant, there was an inverse snobbery at times, but I think there’s been a massive schism, music consumers with taste don’t watch Top of the Pops. Well Top of the Pops doesn’t even exist so they can’t, there’s nothing that’s mainstream, increasingly the mainstream choice for adolescents is to watch YouTube rather than the telly.  So there’s a whole culture going on with a vast amount of music, then big sales on a small amount of music and  people buying into the X factor experience.

SO: Do you think there’s a difference in how you appreciate music between your experiences and what you think the teenage generation is?  In my generation you saved up a lot of money to buy a record or a tape or a CD and you’d invest a lot in that experience because you had limited supply and limited access to music, whereas now you can access whatever you want for free.

RJ: Throwaway.  I think there’s a different experience for me, that idea of finding a cassette tape of a poorly copied version of a record…I had a Stone’s album, my revelation, I found in a burnt out car a copy of Satanic Majesty’s Request which was a really bad copy and when I finally bought they vinyl I was really disappointed that it didn’t have all this atmosphere and crackle and nastiness, and it got played to death.  It looks to me, because you can play much more, that there’s less focal point on wow.

SO: The moment of discovery, that a tape you found by chance that you can’t replicate.

RJ: But maybe YouTube is the equivalent of that, a poor copy of something, but the longevity is not there because it’s an ephemeral thing on the computer.  It might be blitzed for a few weeks then it’s gone, I’m not sure where the longevity comes from now.

SO: There’s a semi academic theory from Gerd Leonard, “music should be free like water and you pay for it like a utility” , it’s up to the music industry to package premium products like Evian.  What are your thoughts as an artist who works with the independent sector as it would be a shift change of music being a product, which is what it’s been for the last 80 years, into music being a service that people consume.

RJ: For about 10 years for me, the obvious model has been a stream-whatever-you-like model, Spotify is part of the way there, it’s not universal you can’t get everything.  As a lover of music, the idea of being able to play any track ever with a search on it is really appealing.  Obviously the only model is a monthly subscription with all the PRS.  It’s PPL aligned, it’s classed as digital distribution if it’s streaming not broadcast.  It’s really appealing, but I have the same ambivalence, if I’m having a party I still want to be able to just have music that’s personal to me, that I’ve acquired from different sources.

Part of what I like doing is grabbing someone’s iTunes collection and working through, a sort of accidental filtering of someone else’s taste.  The appeal is if you know what you want to listen to that would be fantastic, or help you put together a party night or helpful in guiding you.  It would have to be accompanied with a search engine and predictive intelligent stuff otherwise it’s a no-goer.  Universal have done a deal with MySpace and they’ve got download pay buttons coming.

SO: Yes, all the four majors. I’m touching on my research about new types of gatekeepers, the old gatekeepers were the four major labels and the distributors, nowadays you could argue the gatekeepers are Rupert Murdoch owned MySpace or corporate owned Last.fm, what’s your take on it?

RJ: They’re all robbing bastards.  Money is all they care about.  Murdoch is a questionable influence on the whole planet, I’ve read that 60 percent of the world’s press is owned by Murdoch.  That cannot be in any artist’s interests. Whatever the temporary short term benefits are, “we’ve got a MySpace, great we might sell more tracks”, but it will be the same back-hand interests, the same lobbying interests.

SO: So user recommendation becomes Universal Music recommendation.

RJ: Yes, money talks.  There’s no difference in that model to the major stranglehold.  What’s happening is that they’re all vying for power right now, to see who emerges, a group will emerge that will be classed as the new majors, that will strangle it equally the major labels did periodically.  In the early ‘80s it broke apart with all these little labels and you could practically put anything out – and there was a load of shit out, as there is now.  You could put practically anything out and it was left to float on the sea, and then it tightened up into this stranglehold of two million spent on one artist then nothing on anyone else, it went through a shedding a skin, break apart then come together, it’s kind of doing the same but in a new model now.

SO: Would you say those new major players will be pure digital players or 360 degree management companies?

RJ: No they’ll be digital aggregators, because the suits control the distribution, if you can’t democratise it then the corporate will screw it down. It’s just an income stream to them, it doesn’t matter if the artist is or isn’t making a big income from a live situation.  iTunes is never going to want to manage that.  There are people with expertise like TVT, I’ve heard really good things about their promotion, gigging connections. You might get some key players that emerge that are actually beneficial but ultimately people buy their stuff from iTunes.

SO: Do you think between when you started out in the industry and now that there are a lot of expertise we may be losing like in management, marketing or promotion, or is it just a new set of expertise that people are developing like online journalism?

RJ: No, the skills are shifting, there are a loss of some expertise.  From an audio quality point of views, there’s a phenomenal disregard for mix quality.

SO: Is that because budgets have been pushed down so much?

RJ: It’s because everyone thinks they can do it themselves. they sometimes don’t know what they’re doing, frankly.  It takes a f**k of a long time to really get a grip on your art form.  But that isn’t to say great stuff isn’t coming out, it doesn’t mean to say that lofi, don’t know what you’re doing, mixing doesn’t work – it’s just an observation.  There is a degradation in that, it may just be a cyclical thing and people will get fed up with it, as they got fed up with four-on-the-floor, boring, eating its own tailpipe ,recycled house crap.

SO: Punk music also had that DIY ethic that got rooted-out by the ‘80s.

RJ: Exactly, you get the proficiency and musicality coming back in. But the marketing is very specific – all shifting, the smart money is on viral, the techniques you need are radically different, you can’t just take out an advert anymore, doesn’t work, nobody pays any attention.

SO: Have you seen any examples with the artists you’ve worked with where they’ve used internet and digital distribution to do something quite spectacular to get noticed?

RJ: It happens all the time. The indie I’m working with, it’s de rigueur now.  It wasn’t a deliberate viral, there was a track I was working on that got picked up by Sony for the PSP, on a worldwide license, they got it cheap because the company was naive about it but that’s what they were looking for, the company had a great, cool underground website, and they wanted to buy into that cool. They knew that the mechanicals and publishing were at the same place, so they wouldn’t have to faff with the publishing, and they knew they’d be some degree of naively and they’d get it at a steal. And get away with 15 or 20% of the possible going rate.

SO: Did it work for the artist in terms of the exposure they got?

RJ: Yes, it did.  An artist called Red, the same sort of source, trawling for cool websites viral-driven stuff that’s out there, and picking it up and putting a beatboxer on a Suzuki car ad.

SO: There are now more new media outlets for artists that wouldn’t have existed 20 or even 10 years ago.

RJ: Yes, there’s a funnelling, a direct ‘let’s get stuff up there for people’ – it’s an increasingly important focus, it’s been driven and it’s being fed, artists and labels are very aware they need to start holding sync catalogues that people can trawl for stuff.

I think it’s easier to get stuck in the mud to a certain extent, in my educational, professional audio side rather than music lover, there’s a certain fear: oh my god there’s no studios, there’s no proficiency.  I remember standing four or five hours sampling drum tracks in pairs because the drummer couldn’t get the toms in time, and spinning back to 24 track reel – which would be seconds of work in a modern system.  I don’t regret that it’s moved on.  I sense that “that was then, this is now”, there’s no point in having a rose-tinted view of that, whatever quality there was or there wasn’t.

Despite the potential lack of ninja production expertise, the proficiency of audio overall is far higher.  Most people’s mixes today are far better overall than many UK mixes in the ‘80s, the digital makes it easier to control distortion and there’s a constant drive for LOUD mixes . This peer comparison drives the quality up. The modern kit democratises the availaibilty of high quality signal paths.  Less engineering skill is necessary.

SO: Post-production is more sophisticated and skilled?

RJ: Yes partly because there’s a lot of, fancy software tools that make the job easier, and partly because digital makes the whole process far more controllable.  In fact what you’re fighting with now for digital is to introduce chaos. With analogue, what you had to do was eliminate chaos, now you have to introduce chaos because it doesn’t work without that random shit in the background.  You have to introduce some strange matter.  Most of my mastering is about un-squeaking it, un-digitalising it, so it feels more organic.

SO: With the artists and students you work with, what are their motivators for doing it?  Do they seek fame and fortune or world domination?

RJ: In my immediate experience of the generation I’m hooked into now, they’re very much more pragmatic – we were a bunch of arrogant gits – it was about world domination and sex and drugs and rock n’ roll.  I think now it’s not.  There’s a pragmatism that it’s something I want to do, I might make some decent money, I don’t know.  Certainly there’s a massive cross-pollination of audio and video and films and web, I’m seeing a lot of people who are interested in web design, as you would be. I learnt MIDI programming as a musician then started learning engineering skills, now people are doing all of that, some of it’s not so complicated, so there’s room to take on Flash, web design and 2D stuff.

SO: Do they see themselves as being part of media production and content production that just an audio producer?

RJ: Even if they’re concentrating on audio producer, they’re conscious that there’s a multi skill set necessary and desirable.

SO: Are they more business-like than your generation?

RJ: Yes because our generation put in loads of college structure.  If you think of Nottingham specifically, no one in school mentioned creative industries, it didn’t exist as a word, if you said you wanted to be a musician it wasn’t on anyone’s radar, so coming and getting involved in the music scene the first music technology courses I was involved in opening up, but now it’s everywhere.  So that means that there’s so much focus on the practical, the business, the educational side of it, so people are much more savvy.  In a way that’s very good, but in a way it doesn’t help because the people that really succeed go do it anyway, almost despite what they’re being taught.  They’re from a more savvy position but they’re still bucking the system.  The only way to get noticed is to buck the trend and stand out.  I’m not sure how much that’s being broadcast properly in the education system.  That English art school thing is what gave us such a great creative music industry. A real sort of personalisation of your workspace a deconstruction of art.

SO: Bands like Roxy Music came out of St Martin’s College, with crazy ideas about what art and music should be.

RJ: And that’s the great strength, it only exists when you’re aware of it and savvy of it then you rip it, you know. That will never change. There’s a shortfall in jobs for the people they turn out of the music technology degrees, there are a lot more jobs because there’s more TV stations and content providers.  I studied Maths but I didn’t go on to be a Mathematician.  So the idea of music education is a bit strange in its own right. It’s now more about the government wanting to put 50 percent of people through university that it is about what people necessarily want to do. I guess the future is about cross-pollination, the media in whatever sense that it.

The model of music as water is true, to a certain extent, it’s de facto not a theory, it’s here.  Will it stay like that?  I don’t know, it’s open.  That means that focus has to go elsewhere.  I see a lot of people I know getting into film.  I wonder where the political voice has gone from the ‘80s, it was all about having something to say, the hip-hop scene says it, but I wonder if a lot of that energy is going into other media. Web and film, it’s an overlap, and gaming as well.

SO: Do you think raw innovation is taking place in other industries like computer games?

RJ: Yes, at the moment, the real innovation is coming out of gaming and interactive web.  Music technology, can’t improve much more, there’s nothing I can’t do on a laptop that would have cost $1,000 a day to do not long ago, now I can do it in my bedroom.  Everything from pitch correction to highest quality mixing, I’ve got the best tools on the planet.  It would cost a fortune to own the equivalent analog kit.

Once technology has got to the point where you can do anything you could ever want to do, the innovation will happen elsewhere.  Interactive gaming, the idea of connectivity, not an experience you have on your own, that kind of mass broadcasting, experiential music video film.  There’s a lot more for people to concentrate on, there’s a lot more distractions. The outlet for rebellion which was music has diffused somewhat into different areas.

Robin’s band A Million Sons can be found on MySpace at www.myspace.com/amillionsons

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