Are albums dying? /w Guy Hornsby from the ‘This is not Happening’ podcast | Ep#7 AMF Podcast

Now, I normally start these podcasts by asking my guest to introduce themselves and give us their story and musical journey. But I feel for this show, it might be better if we start with you telling us about the ‘This is Not Happening’ podcast.

I think a quick rundown of what you cover on your show will give the listeners a good understanding of why I asked you on to talk about albums. Shoot!

The podcast was never really a planned thing. But I’m so glad we did it. 

A set of friends from Leeds (and me) decided to start a blog – called This Is Not Happening as a riff on LCD’s Soundsystem’s album at the time, as one of our shared loves. We all read music blogs and press but wanted our own place to do it. 

Back at the start of the 2010s – myself, 

• Nolan Kane – a Canadian DJ and promoter that I met at Leeds’ legendary Speedqueen night in the mid-00s 

• his ex-housemate Joey Story 

• their best friend David Allison. 

• And a shout to Paolo who did a few years as part of the crew. 

We come from different places and backgrounds but we all love music, and we wanted to share music we loved. So after a bit more of a scattergun approach, we decided to nominate an album each month, buy it for the rest of the crew, and post about it on the blog. We never really thought of it as anything more than a way to share our passions and never really promoted it. Occasionally an album or post got interest, but really it was a nice way to connect with each other over something that was really important to all of us.  

Covered all sorts – hip-hop, indie, pop, dance, classic albums – and we all brought our own angle to it. Fast forward to Lockdown and 100s of posts and 10 years of ‘albums of the months’ and one of us half-seriously suggested a podcast. I think a bit more out of desperation to have something to do!

I’d actually wanted to do one for a while but wasn’t really sure about what – I’d toyed with Sport but music felt the most obvious – and so we decided to do a test run, pick the album of the time – Run the Jewels’ RTJ4, and gave it a go and it really just clicked. We really enjoyed talking about the music, much more than writing as it was so much more reactive and immediate – exactly why I like about listening to pods myself…. And we seemed to gel pretty well. It’s odd, we’d never all spoken to each other before that! 

So 8 episodes on and we’ve covered everyone from RTJ to Paul McCartney, Caribou to Sault, and Bicep to Jessie Ware. It’s been a real bonus of creative outlet in Lockdown when I we were all struggling at times, and it’s something we really look forward to each month. It’s also worth noting that I’ve only ever met David once and still never met Joey!

Amazing, so, beyond co-hosting the ‘This is not Happening’ what other musical projects have you been a part of. I know you’re one half of Son of Bangers, and have done some work at glasto. Could you fill us in on all that and tell us a bit about your musical history?

I’ve loved music since I used to sit with my dad’s headphones on as a toddler and listened to my folks’ Beatles and Motown albums, and it’s fair to say I’ve got a pretty wide palette. I don’t think I really would consider many of my music loves before my 20s as cool or edgy. But that changed when I went to Sheffield uni in 1993. I first went to a proper club in Sheffield – we had amazing venues like The Leadmill, Music Factory and the Arches and say guys like Frankie Knuckles, Farley jackmaster, Alister Whitehead, the Luvdup twins. Sasha,. Craig Campbell, Boy George…. For the first time – then fell into DJing in 1998 through friends. Since then it’s been divided between DJing, clubs and dance music and gigs and festivals and writing about music. Many of my best friends I’ve met through music and it’s the one constant in my life. 

My first gigs were trance (!) and funky house back in early 2000s – and I’m sure a lot of others my age are the same. I’m not snobbish about it and still have a few of those records stashed away. I was part of some bigger promotions in London and was lucky enough to play at the End, MoS, Heaven, Turnmills, Rhythm Factory, SEOne, and all sorts of bars and clubs now gone. 

I then ran a smaller night called Dropout in the late 00s at places like the Horse and Groom and Star of Bethnal Green. We had some cool guests like Chris Finke, Craig Torrance, Bearweasel, and the Louche and Polaroid guys. I’ve also managed to play in Croatia, Dublin, And a bunch of gigs in Ibiza through websites I wrote for and connections I had. Going to the island almost every year from 2002 to 2015 Way more than I’d ever thought i’d get.

It was a pretty golden time we all have in our 20s and 30s when you live for the weekend, and I’ve got some amazing memories of gigs and nights seeing everyone from Prince to LCD Soundsystem, Radiohead and Beck to Hot Chip and Chemical Brothers. And more clubs that I can possibly remember. I wrote about music all through the last two decades and was lucky enough to go to some amazing places like Sonar in Barca, Exit in Serbia, and festivals in Oz and Ireland.  

Son of Bangers came about through my best friend Tom and me starting to consider giving up promoting and DJing in the early 00s as gigs dried up and I lost a bit of love for the scene. But we started playing together at bars – playing literally anything we wanted – and that’s where Son Of Bangers was born. We had a long time friend – Dave Minns – who said he was starting to run a radio station in a burger place in London – Meat Mission – and we played opening day, thinking it would be a one-off, but that ended up running for almost 4 years, and since then Dave’s new outfit – Musicbox Radio – saw us play by the Thames, at Lost Village, and I also managed to play at Secret Garden and then play and work for the Glade at Glastonbury in 2014 and 2015 Pretty AMAZING. I was due back in 2020 but…. So I gave up and then had a new stage to my career, all because of the bangers. 

One more question before we get into the meat of the show. A bit of a quick fire. What are your top 3 albums of all time and why? No pressure right!

God, it could change every day, depending on all sorts but three that are in my top 5 pretty much all the time are these. 

• LCD Soundsystem – Sound Of Silver

  • One of the reasons the blog was formed. LCD are the nexus of electronic and guitars. I loved everything they’ve done and this is still (just) their best. I’ve been to some of the best gigs of my life for this band, At Glastonbury, Ally Pally, All Points East…. All My Friends was the last song i played on SOB when i did my last show in london after 7 years, and the last song at my wedding disco, with us all singing along. It’s a song and album that links so many of us. Also Al is in the band, and he also straddles my love for HC. 

• Radiohead – Ok Computer

  • It still sounds modern. It’s over 20 years old but it was visionary. It’s actually really close with In Rainbows, but ….it’s hard not to overstate its effect on music and they seem to just capture that melancholy and dislocation from the world in the most beautiful way. A perfect Coivid album!!! 

• David Bowie – Blackstar

  • Musically brilliant, Im’ a big Bowie fan, but the resonance of an artist knowing they were dying and making something like that. I’m not sure many others could have done that, and it’s one of his best works. An artist who was considered a bit past it, showing he still had something to say. This album got me back into his back catalogue too. 

Now, I’m slightly ashamed to admit this, but I cannot remember the last time I bought an album. It’s a crime I know, but also, I’m probably a good case study for the change in buying habits away from LP and towards, certainly, for me,  buying individual tracks. Why do you feel the album isn’t seeing any love nowadays? Or have I completely misread the landscape?

• Only ¼ of all music sales are now physical. But there’s still a big digital sales trend. Streaming is growing at a huge rate though. In lockdown in the uk, album sales were up 8% in 2020. But…. For the first time since records began in 1973, not a single album released in the last 12 months was certified platinum – representing 300,000 sales – although Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia is currently closing in on that figure.There were also no British debut albums among the year’s best-selling records, illustrating the difficulties new artists have faced in finding an audience during the coronavirus pandemic.

• Our habits – shorter things (tiktok, snapchat, insta) – have changed. In my youth there was no social media, CDs were only just in the mainstream, as were still cassettes, there was no youtube…. You had to search out music and you didn’t jump through tracks. You just listened. There was more of an investment in it, but that has slowly changed. Back then you had to go to a shop and buy a record, you couldn’t get it any other way bar maybe a tape-to-tape shifty thing….  

• Now it seems attention spans are shorter, people are so distracted – including me – phone on, tv on, magazine open. The long form of music, journalism, film/tv is all changing. So it’s not hard to see where the trend is going. 

• But – the album is mindful! Listening undisturbed for 45 mins…. Shutting out the world. It still has that power.  

• The figures suggest that listeners are seeking out a more diverse range of music on streaming services, which now account for 80.6% of music consumption in the UK.

• The numbers don’t tell all the story. You look at the biggest selling albums each year – the Adeles and Ed Sheerans – they are big big sales but how much does this filter down to the top 10 and beyond.? 21 sold over 5m, but look at lower down and it’s a different story. A BBC article (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-46735093) in 2019 showed CD sales collapsed at the end of the decade from 130m in 2008 to just over 30m, but over half of sales were then digital. Many of the bigger sales are now compilations or soundtracks too. Some albums in top 10s in the US were not even released physically at all. Vinyl is increasing but it’s a tiny fraction of physical sales.

• In the US, album sales have fallen year on year by 10% since 2015. 

• FT article https://www.ft.com/content/57cfe6cc-ffe6-4ef9-8692-e2c6180186b3 – from April said that while CD and vinyl sales slowed significantly in lockdown, they still contribute heavily to charts.  

• Look at Stormzy – in 2019, Heavy Is the Head was a huge album but it sold around 130k, and in 2020  – Check? 

• Maybe a generational thing? But I consume music in many ways and formats. Having written about music for most of the last 20 years I listened to a huge amount of EPs and tracks, but also still quite a few albums. 

• Listening habits – the way we consume culture is changing. Films and cinemas v Netflix and Sky. Buying albums v streaming and playlists. Everything is more accessible, it’s more magpie-ish, certainly my friends’ kids are into everything. Of course we influence this, or try to, but in my teenage years it was tapes and CDs and that’s the only way you to buy an album. That feels like ancient history. Albums also require time to be invested in them, they evolve with each listen. Do people have the time or want to put that in these days? 

• Streaming – how much do you listen but not buy? I try to ensure that if I love an album and listen more than 5 times I buy it – see also Bandcamp fridays.   I only really started using Spotify in the last 6 months when we started the podcast, because so much of the music that’s shared is via that. I am not a big fan of it because of the business model. Especially with lockdown and no live music it’s a devastating time for music so it’s our responsibility to ensure that they get what they due. If you talk about how hard it is for the industry then only stream music, you’re part of the problem – 

  • Mention #BrokenRecord and Parliamentary DCMS hearing? 

  • There’s no justification of that business model. And Spotify isn’t even the lowest. Youtube is one of the lowest. 

• Without a doubt the blog and then the podcast helped me keep this up. I didn’t buy as many albums, or it was slowing at the end of the 00s but it really revived it, and made me realise how much I love that experience. 

What, in your opinion, does an album let an artist or band do that a collection of singles doesn’t? Essentially I’m asking what are the benefits of releasing an album? 

Its’ about a story, a narrative. Of course, some albums just feel like (or are) a collection of singles or (for dance) just ‘bangers’ but the best albums are much more than the sum of their parts. They’re the ability for the artist(s) to have a much more free reign. To show what they’re really about. 

• How much can you really discover about an artist from their singles? They are – by definition – designed for instant impact – a single hit, 3-4 minutes of music that exist only in itself. An album it totally different. 

• Look at your favourite ones. Great albums make you want to listen from start to finish. They do something to you. For me I know I love an album when – after a few listens I’m already excited about the next song when the current one is coming near its end. 

• Sometimes they’re just a great collection of songs that tell you about the artist or the music. Look at things like Roisin Murphy – a real ‘dancefloor album’ that’s instantly accessible but also you hear the lyrics and start to see something more (pun intended). Or something like Caribou’s Suddenly. There’s obvious dancfloor chops but some of the songs are really poignant. Ultimately a great album does more than that. Similarly Bicep’s Isles – which isn’t just bangers, it’s got changes of pace, light and dark. But it makes you want to dance. 

• Sault – wasn’t just an amazing collection of modern soul/dub/afrobeat but it was about 2020 and living as a black person in the age we are. It resonated, it made you feel something. Or Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, that sounded bleak, remote, echoing their surroundings. 

• Concepts too – look at Kendrick Lamarr’s To Pimp A Butterfly, or Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On? Or xxx they have a theme, a story, a narrative, that elevates the music to something way more than just a collection of tunes. 

Which artists, in your opinion, are bucking this trend? Releasing great, timeless, and influential albums. 

So many of the good albums of the last few years do this: 

• Sault – Untitled [Black Is] and Rise timeless, faceless music. A soul album with so many influences and incredible tracks, but it’s a cohesive whole. Its much more powerful than the tracks on their own. 

• Caribou – Suddenly  – dance music for non-dancers? Or ….. Just a beautiful collection of songs that have to be heard in a one go. And before it Swim and 

• RTJ – landing at the right time with teh black lives matter movement and covid, just blended incredible lyrics and beats with a serious dose of not giving a fuck. (can we swear?)

• Kiwanuka =- past v present – amazing production. 

• Roisin of course…. Wow. 

• Kendrick – really experimental at times – look at TPAB. + Little Simz

• Christine and the Queens – about gender, but lots of 90s influences. 

• Bicep? You can see their influence – Orbital, Underworld, Chemical Brothers, Leftfield.  

• Kelly Lee Owens -dance music with warmth, character, 

• Hot Chip – Bathful ?

• James Blake – genre all of his ownm? 

• Kevin Morby…./ ?@ 

To finish the show: What are your predictions for the future of music? Specifically the production and release of songs and tracks by artists? Will we see more self-releases and promotion. Streaming giants continuing to dominate? What do you think? 

I want to be optimistic about music. Because so much of it is key to so many things that have happened in my life – the friends I have, the places I’ve gone. And I know people will continue to make music, but my worry is that the streaming giants and major labels will continue to monopolise music and how you make money from it. So much of everything seems tied into venues and music ecosystem. It’s not just about the top 10s. 

• BAD 

• The worst that could happen is that – especially with the effect of the pandemic kicks in in 2021/22 is that these monopolies continue. And that venues that are the lifeblood of music never open again. 

  • We also see how hard it is to tour the EU at the moment or sell physical music in it. Labels have had shipments go missing, never turn up, or simply too expensive to sell now. 

  • Because it’s not just about the top of the pyramid, it’s about the whole chain. Like any ecosystem, if the lowest levels struggle the whole thing is in trouble. Also as the streaming model dominates, how much can working class or poorer artists make a living? No one wants to see only a smaller group writing about music. Where’s the struggle then? 

  • Plus this is a govt that doesn’t seem to understand or care about most culture. It’s all very well giving millions to the Albert Hall but how many people from Oldham or WIgan or Bristol are going to go there? If we care about music, about culture then you have to support the whole system. It is hard to feel positive about things, but I know – like the pandemic – things will pass. 

  •  

• GOOD – 

• But I’m an optimist by nature. I have to believe things can and will change. There’s such an incredible passion and love at the grassroots levels, whether it’s labels, record shops, venues, promoters, DJs, bands – that will still try to make and sell music until they have nothing left to give, Our culture is so rich, we can’t let it fail but….. It’s also down to the public. Do they care enough to change how the consume music? Long form – is it coming back? Mindfulness and focusing on one thing?